Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you 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.
Better than JSON:
- You need or want data to be human readable
- Data from the service is directly consumed by a web browser
- Your server side application is written in JavaScript
- You aren’t prepared to tie the data model to a schema
- You don’t have the bandwidth to add another tool to your arsenal
- The operational burden of running a different kind of network service is too great
- Download & install protobuf tool: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases