Protocol Buffers Over HTTP: You Don’t Need gRPC to Use Protobuf

Protocol Buffers can be used directly over standard HTTP without gRPC. The article demonstrates building a Go HTTP server that serves Protobuf-encoded binary data, proving that Protobuf is just a serialization format independent of the transport layer. It includes a working example with two endpoints: one returning Protobuf binary data and another decoding it back to JSON, showing how to leverage Protobuf's benefits (smaller payload size, faster serialization, type safety) while maintaining existing HTTP infrastructure.