Data Serialization

Data Serialization

Data serialization

June 26, 2009

Avro, Data Serialization, General, Protocol Buffers, Etch, Get Together, Thrift

Data serialization # XML, JSON and others are currently standard data exchange formats. Being human-readable but still structured enough to be easily parsable by programs is their main benefit. Problems are overhead in size and parsing time. In addition at least xml is not really as human-readable as it could be. An alternative are binary formats. Yet those often are not platform independent (either C++ or Java or Python bindings) or are not upgradable (what if your boss comes along and wants you to add yet another field? ...