Protocol Buffers

I just read about the recently released Protocol Buffers from Google.

“Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice. These classes come complete with heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an extremely compact format. Best of all, the classes are easy to use: each field has simple “get” and “set” methods, and once you’re ready, serializing the whole thing to – or parsing it from – a byte array or an I/O stream just takes a single method call.”

It’s like XML binding, only supposedly MUCH faster, and it looks very easy as well. The Java Tutorial lays it out pretty simply.

I’m definitely going to try using Protocol Buffers next time I need to transport some data across the wire and see how it goes. Has anyone tried this yet? Any comments?