[mattb314]

re: efficiency, I think this blog post does a decent job explaining: https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobu.... Basically, it doesn't make a huge difference if you're communicating with a Javascript endpoint, but Java to Java (or probably between other non-js backends) you can save a lot of time on serialization/deserialization. It's worth noting that the post uses fairly large blobs (50k people and addresses), and you probably won't see as big of a difference on smaller requests.