Protocol Buffers are a serialization format developed by Google- you might ask if another IDL is really needed here – is Google barking at the wrong tree?

But protocol buffers offer some advantages over data serialization via XML or JSON – Google says they (compared to XML)..

• are 3 to 10 times smaller
• are 20 to 100 times faster
• provide generated data access classes for programmatic use
• provide backward compatibility

So lets play around a little with protocol buffers in Java and build a small application that serializes and deserializes some data using a defined format..

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