Google’s awesome, they release some nifty software to the open source community. Here is the link to Google’s Protocol Buffer and more details are available on Google’s Open Source Blog
From what I can tell, it’s a solid format that can replace XML in most scenarios. It’s not as easily human-readable as XML, but then again from experience not many humans are actively reading the XML anyways. The proto format reminds me of a json structure, minus the curly brackets. Also, from skimming the proto java documentation there isn’t support for primitive arrays (at least for java). You should be using List containers instead along with the proto “repeated” scalar.
They include code for data binding source .proto files to C++, Java and Python. This makes it easier to adopt in your next project. I think this is a good data format for internal use, but you’ll probably still have to deal with XML/SOAP and other RPC formats (JSON, etc) on your external interfaces. This would require transforming the internal data format (.proto) into the external format. There is also stub generating code for producing server interfaces that you can drop into your native rpc server implementations. This is pretty cool also.
Hmmm, I see some useful Mule and Camel transformers that could be made to take advantage of this new format. And possibly service adaptors for Mule and Camel too.
Most ideas of google are interested. Google’s Protocol Buffer is cool.