Google Open Sourced It’s Internal Development Tool Called “Protocol Buffers”

Google today announced availability of their most widely-used internal development tools "Protocol Buffers" to the Open Source community.

Google deals with thousands of different data formats to represent networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, geospatial datasets, and more. Most of these formats are structured, not flat. It’s interesting to know How do they encode it all ? To handle it, Google developed it’s Protocol Buffers.

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

Take a look at the documentation or you can download the code.