Protobuf - a google's data interchange format

Protobuf

a google's data interchange format

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Hunter's comment

As we all know buffers play an important role anywhere specially in the programming industry.

That's why there are a lot of those that were made. One good example is the Protobuf or shall we say Protocol Buffer.

Protocol Buffers

are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler.

In addition to, it is something like

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.

Protocol Buffers are available in different languages like Java, Python, Objective-C and c++ but as time goes by, it's being modified new versions which can work with more languages already.

How to Use: (Sample Code)

message Person {
required string name = 1;
required int32 id = 2;
optional string email = 3;
}

There are more interesting thing to do with Protobuf. All you have to do is to download and install the protocol buffer directly to your system. But it is encouraged to first read their tutorials and documentations to give an idea how the buffer works.