Open Source Protocol Buffers

Google tries to be the cool guy and from time to time donates one of its many building bricks to the community. Apache license, everyone does what they want with it.

This time it's Protocol Buffers. What is it good for? To store any structured data - something like XML, but better:

• Simple. Minimalistic, nothing is over-complicated.
• Fast. Parsing, writing, checking all very efficient.
• Compact. Takes little space.
• (Of course it's available from C++, Java and Python)

And the most important:

• Peter uses it every day in his work (like everyone else around here).

More on the Google blog:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/protocol-buffers-googles-data.html

Download from here:
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

Something else I use every day:
http://code.google.com/p/googletest/