Protocol Buffers

Protocol Buffers ( protobuf ) is a data format for serialization using an interface description language. It was developed by Google Inc. and partially released under a 3-clause BSD license. There are official implementations for C , Java and Python as free software under Apache License 2.0. Many other programming languages ​​like C, Ruby, JavaScript, and C # are supported by third party projects.

The main design criteria of Protocol Buffers are simplicity and performance. Therefore, it is designed as a binary format as opposed to XML which relies on a textual format.

Protocol Buffers were developed from 2001 to 2008 internally at Google. Since 2008 the compiler and the libraries are available under an open source license, and you can follow the development by public Google. Google uses Protocol Buffers for storing and exchanging structured data and as a base for an RPC system for intermaschinellen communication.