What does Protocol Buffers actually mean? Find out inside PCMag's comprehensive tech and computer-related encyclopedia.

Google released an FAQ detailing Protocol Buffers, along with source code for the Java, Python, and C++ protocol buffer compilers.

Protocol buffers are now Google's lingua franca for data – at time of writing, there are 48,162 different message types defined in the Google code tree across 12,183 .proto files.

A protocol is a means of describing an communication interaction. Each of the individual messages used in a protocol can be encoded or decoded in a particular format by a codec. What's your take on ...

Based on HTTP/2 for transport, and a technology called Protocol Buffers for defining the data format, gRPC is designed to be a cross-platform protocol with support for multiple languages.

Why did Google decide to go Open Source? "We have many other projects we would like to release as [O]pen [S]ource that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first.