Protocol Buffers

Protocol Buffers is a language-neutral and platform-neutral utility for serializing structured data. It uses a simple interface definition language to define your data structure once, then generates source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams using a variety of languages. The data is encoded into a compact binary format, making it significantly faster and smaller than XML or JSON for data exchange between services and applications, ideal for performance-critical systems and data storage.