Google on Monday said that it has created an open-source project for a data interchange format called Protocol Buffers.

The software is meant to solve the problem of sharing information in a wide range of formats between servers at high speed. It’s also designed to let companies like Google upgrade software on a network of connected servers without causing hiccups.

Google thought of using XML as a lingua franca to send messages between its different servers. But XML can be complicated to work with and, more significantly, creates large files that can slow application performance.

Protocol Buffers is an alternative way of describing the format of data that is being sent over the network or stored to a hard drive. Unlike XML, it’s a compact format and is designed to be simple to use, according to Kenton Varda, from Google’s Software Engineering Team.

Varda wrote in the company’s open-source blog:

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.

Matt Cutts, a software engineering from Google’s Webspam team, said that Protocol Buffers automatically generates Java, Python, or C code.