Best practices for serialization

This section summarizes the best practices for serializing and deserializing the data. These practices will help you make efficient decisions for using serialization in your applications and writing your schema definitions in Protocol Buffers and other formats:

• Keeping your schema backward compatible: Avoid any changes in your data schema that would break any existing callers. Such changes include modifications (renaming or removal) of field names and types.
• Ensuring that data schemas are kept in sync between clients and servers: For serialization formats with explicit schema definitions, such as Apache Thrift, Protocol Buffers, and Apache Avro, you should keep clients and servers in sync with the latest schema versions.
• Documenting implicit details: Let the callers know any implicit details related to your data schema. For example, if your API does not allow an empty value of a certain field of a structure, include this in the comments...