Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers in a bid to get developers churning out free code that uses the search engine.

According to a FAQ page everyone inside Google uses the protocol buffers and the outfit has lots of projects it wants to release as open source that use them. However to do that Google needed to release protocol buffers first. Google needs to use some different data formats because XML is not entirely up to the job.

The search engines protocol buffers mean that developers define how data is structures once and then can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.

The data structure can be updated without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the 'old' format. Google claims its protocol buffers are three to 10 times smaller and 20 to 100 times faster than XML.

More here.