Fresh from the Google Open Source Blog comes news that Google has released their Protocol Buffers specification and accompanying libraries. The code and specification has been release at Protocol Buffers on Google Code.
Protocol Buffers is a data format for fast exchange and parsing of data and messages between computers. It is similar to simple uses of XML in this manner, but the messages size on the wire and their parsing time is very much optimized for busy sites. There is no need to spend loads of time doing XML parsing when you instead could do something useful. It’s very easy to interact with the messages through the generated classes (for C++, Java and Python), and future versions of the same schema are compatible with old versions (as new fields are just ignored by older parsers).
Still no PHP implementation available, so guess it’s time to get going and lay down some code during the summer. Anyone up for the job?