Thrift, Avro, Protocolbuffers - Are they all dead?
Working on a pet project (cassandra, spark, hadoop, kafka) I need a data serialization framework. Checking out the common three frameworks - namely Thrift, Avro and Protocolbuffers - I noticed most of them seem to be dead-alive having 2 minor releases a year at most.
This leaves me with two assumptions:
- They are as complete as such a framework should be and just rest in maintenance mode as long as no new features are needed
- There is no reason to exist for such framework - not being obvious to me why. If so, what alternatives are out there?
If anyone could give me a hint to my assumptions, any input is welcome.
Answer
Protocol Buffers is a very mature framework, having been first introduced nearly 15 years ago at Google. It's certainly not dead: Nearly every service inside Google uses it. But after so much usage, there probably isn't much that needs to change at this point. In fact, they did a major release (3.0) this year, but the release was as much about removing features as adding them.
Protobuf's associated RPC system, gRPC, is relatively new and has had much more activity recently. (However, it is based on Google's internal RPC system which has seen some 12 years of development.)
I don't know as much about Thrift or Avro but they have been around a while too.