 in the address book has a name, an ID, an email address, and a contact phone number.</p>
<p>So, how might one serialize and retrieve structured data like this if protobuf wasn’t around? There are a few ways to solve this problem:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Use Java Serialization. This is the default approach since it’s built into the language, but it has a host of well-known problems (see Effective Java, by Josh Bloch pp. 213), and also doesn’t work very well if you need to share data with applications written i