Today Google released their Protocol Buffer serialisation framework into open source. There is a
blog about it, and
here is the news item comparing it to XML.
The docs are
here.
It looks pretty cool, and easy to use. It will encode to little endian on the wire, with very compact and optimised encoding, including 128 *varint* and zig-zag encoding (which encodes and decodes with just 3 bitwise operations). Backwards compatibility is handled as well (so long as we only extend the message field ID and not reuse previous ones). So far there are only 3 language bindings: C++, Java, and Python. Unfortunately there is no C# mapping yet.
This serialisation framework is optimised for speed and efficiency, and versioning/compatibility. The language binding from spec (.proto) files saves the need for writing hand-coded serialisation code for every class in your library, or for classes in different languages in your system needing to communicate with each other.
Details of the encoding is
here.
The language guides are
here, and the API reference is
here.
There are also some tutorials, including a
C++ tutorial.
