Protocol Buffers

Protocol Buffers also known as protobuf refer to a platform and language-neutral mechanism developed and maintained by Google that you could employ for serializing structured data for various projects, such as data storage or communication protocols.

With a modus operandi similar to XML, but smaller, simpler and faster, the utility enables you to define how the data should be structured. While they are considered overall better than XML, they do not always represent the best solution. If your project entails modeling a text-based document with markup, XML would be more efficient as it allows you to interleave structure with text, for example.

Compatible with most of the programming languages available nowadays, the tool allows you to use your own generated source code. Moreover, you can read the structured data to and from a variety of data stream and update it without having to worry about breaking the deployed programs compiled against an older format.

To specify the preferred method of serializing the data, you should start by defining the protocol buffer message types in the new .proto file you create. Take note that the protocol buffer message represents a relatively small record of information that packs a series of a name-value pair. Afterwards, you can run the protocol buffer compiler for the app's language and hence, you are able to generate data access classes.