# Google's Protocol Buffers

Protocol  buffers  are  Google's    language-neutral,  platform-neutral,
extensible mechanism for serializing structured data   –  think XML, but
smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how   you  want your data to be
structured once. This takes the form of   a  template that describes the
data structure. You use this template  to   encode  and decode your data
structure into wire-streams that may be sent-to or read-from your peers.
The underlying wire stream is platform independent, lossless, and may be
used to interwork with a variety of  languages and systems regardless of
word size or endianness.

This  document  was  produced  using  PlDoc,    with  sources  found  in
protobufs.pl and protobufs_overview.md. There  is   a  simple example at
addressbook.pl,                       installed                       at
``<base>/doc/packages/examples/protobufs/interop/addressbook.pl``

@see https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers
@author Jeffrey Rosenwald (JeffRose@acm.org), Peter Ludemann (peter.ludemann@gmail.com)
@license BSD-2