Today Google open-sourced a component we’ve used in-house for a long time called Protocol Buffers. It’s a binary format that we use for almost all of our on-the-wire messages and lots of disk-based long-term storage as well. It’s a big improvement over XML.

Why not just use XML?

Protocol buffers have many advantages over XML for serializing structured data. Protocol buffers:

  • are simpler
  • are 3 to 10 times smaller
  • are 20 to 100 times faster
  • are less ambiguous
  • generate data access classes that are easier to use
  • programmatically

–Protobuf Developer Guide

If you or your company needs a very compact, very fast, extensible format for structured data, you should give Protobufs a good look!

(P.S. Of course I don’t speak for Google. The attitude is all me talking and my personal disdain for XML. Google’s official attitude is, of course, much more diplomatic).