Protocol buffers
My, weddings and honeymoons are fun. Anyway, previously I've mentioned "Protocol Buffers" in the context of Facebook's Thrift, which is a reimplementation. "Protocol buffers are now Google's lingua franca for data". Well, Google finally went ahead and open sourced their Protocol Buffers implementation. It's a neat little way of encoding structured data (think XML or ASN.1) in C++, Java and Python and there is work on implentations for other languages (including Perl). Good writeup. Keep on eye on them.
