Google Open-sources 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, according to official company blog posts and documents.

“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.”

Google uses “thousands of different data formats to represent networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, geospatial datasets, and more,” wrote Kenton Varda, a member of Google’s software engineering team, in a blog post. “Most of these formats are structured, not flat. This raises an important question: How do we encode it all?”

Full article: pcworld.com