Protocol buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format.
Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.
Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development.
It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk and OCaml.
