Would you recommend Google Protocol Buffers or Caucho Hessian for a cross-language over-the-wire binary format?

Question

Would you recommend Google Protocol Buffers or Caucho Hessian for a cross-language over-the-wire binary format? Or anything else, for that matter - Facebook Thrift for example?

Answer 1

Muscle has a binary message transport. Sorry that I can't comment on the others as I haven't tried them.

Answer 2

I'm myself looking into this.. no good conclusions so far, but I found http://dewpoint.snagdata.com/2008/10/21/google-protocol-buffers/ summarizing all the options.

Answer 3

Depends on use case. PB is much more tightly coupled, best used internally with closely-coupled systems; not good for shared/public interfaces (as in to be shared between more than 2 specific systems). Hessian is bit more self-descriptive, has nice performance on Java. Better than PB on my tests, but I'm sure that depends on use case. PB seems to have trouble with textual data, perhaps it has been optimized for integer data.

I don't think either is particularly good for public interfaces, but given you want binary format, that is probably not a big problem.

Answer 4

I tried Google Protocol Buffers. It works with C++/MFC, C#, PHP and more languages (see: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/wiki/ThirdPartyAddOns) and works really well regardless of transport and disk save/loading.

Answer 5

We use Caucho Hessian because of the reduced integration costs and simplicity. It's performance is very good, so it's perfect for most cases.

For a few apps where cross-language integration is not that important, there's an even faster library that can squeeze even more performance called Kryo. Unfortunately it's not that widely used, and it's protocol is not quasi-standard like the one from Hessian.

Answer 6

If you need a support to interconnect apps from many languages/platforms, than Hessian is the best. If you use only Java, than Kryo is even faster.