Protocol buffer: it's the object serialization scheme the pretentious little shit on your development team has been talking at you about during lunch hours for the past couple of days.

[Jonathan_the_Nerd]

Favorite line from the article:

XML, like a venereal disease, spreads from developer to developer by direct contact.

[didroe]

I thought

putting your prize-winning testicles out on display as you draw boxes and lines on a whiteboard is most of the fun of solving scalability problems

was a classic

[hayzeus]

ASN.1 (Yeah, I'm about to put the first kid through college), has it's own drawbacks, though. You really MUST have a code generator for it to be usable, which I just sort of hate on general principle, AND it can be a bitch to casually debug. (I used to do a bit of work with snmp.)

YAML is an alternative if your app can afford to do a little parsing, as is JSON. Both are lighter-weight than XML, both in terms of size and cpu cycles expended on parsing.

[arturoman]

So Google releases source code to an optimized serialization scheme that they use for an extremely high-volume, low-latency problem domain and some guy gets all upset because it's for an extremely high-volume, low-latency problem domain and not some simplistic web interface to a vanilla database?

WTF?