Google protocol buffers: Open-source Data Exchange Language

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases.

"Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

Protocol buffers are three to 10 times smaller and 20 to 100 times faster than XML, according to Google.

Google has prepared a download page that contains protocol buffer compilers for Java, C++ and Python.