Welcome to the developer documentation for protocol buffers – a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage, and more. This documentation is aimed at Java, C++, or Python developers who want to use protocol buffers in their applications. This overview introduces protocol buffers and tells you what you need to do to get started – you can then go on to follow the tutorials or delve deeper into protocol buffer encoding. API reference documentation is also provided for all three languages, as well as language and style guides for writing .proto files. - dreikanter