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

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.