Creating and Implementing Services

In the previous chapter, we learned a lot about Protocol Buffers. In particular, we saw what the interface definition language looks like, how to define messages and services, and how to use the protoc tool to generate code in our desired target language.

To create a service, we use what we learned in that chapter to write a .proto source file that defines the service and the request and response types it needs. Let’s start small: here is a service with just two methods for retrieving information about movies from a database stored on the server. We’ll create a file named proto/sfapi.proto that looks like so:

Protocol Buffer

syntax = "proto3";

// The "google/protobuf" import folder provides several types that
// are included with protoc. This one is a representation of
// timestamps/dates.
import "google/protobuf/timestamp.proto";

option go_package = "proto";

service Starfriends {
  // Get a single...