Protobuf

Protobuf, or Protocol Buffers, is a method developed by Google for serializing structured data. It's both language-neutral and platform-neutral. Google designed it to be smaller and faster than XML. You design your data structures in .proto files, then use the Protobuf compiler protoc to generate data access classes in your chosen language. Google provides support for several languages including: Java, C++, Python, Objective-C, and C#. Community developed support for even more languages is also available. This gives protobuf a great deal of versatility, making it a popular choice for data storage and communication between services.