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At Google, our mission is organizing all of the world's information. We use literally thousands of different data formats to represent networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, geospatial datasets, and more. Most of these formats are structured, not flat. This raises an important question: How do we encode it all? XML? No, that wouldn't work. Do we just write the raw bytes of our in-memory data structures to the wire? No, that's not going to work either. Instead, we developed Protocol Buffers. Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice.