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?
Would you recommend Google Protocol Buffers or Caucho Hessian for a cross-language over-the-wire binary format?
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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.
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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.
EDIT: Hessian performance is actually not all that good as, per jvm-serializers benchmark. And PB is pretty fast as long as you make sure to add the flag that forces use of fast options on Java. And if PB is not good for public interfaces, what is? IMO, open formats like JSON are superior externally, and more often than not fast enough that performance does not matter a lot.
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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.
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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.
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For me, Caucho Hessian is the best.
It is very easy to get started, and the performance is good. I have tested local, the latent is about 3ms, on Lan you can expect about 10ms.
With hessian you don't have to write another file to define the model (we using java + java). It saves a lot of time for development and maintenance.
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Muscle has a binary message transport. Sorry that I can't comment on the others as I haven't tried them.
I would say that ProtocolBuffers, Thrift or Hessian are fairly similar as far as their Binary formats are concerned - where they provide cross-language serialization support. The inherent serialization might have some small performance differences between them ( size/space tradeoffs ) but this is not the most important thing. ProtocolBuffers is certainly a well performing IDL defined format which has features for extensibility which make it attractive.
HOWEVER the use of an "over-the-wire" in the question implies the use of a communications library. Here Google has provided an interface definition for protobuf RPC, which is equivalent to making a specification where all implementation details is left to the implementer. This is unfortunate because it means there is de-facto NO cross-language implementation - unless you can find a cross language implementation probably mentioned here http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/wiki/ThirdPartyAddOns. I have seen some RPC implementations which support java and c, or c and c++, or python and c etc, but here you just have to find a library which satisfies your concrete requirements and evaluate otherwise youre likely to be disappointed. ( At least i was disappointed enough to write protobuf-rpc-pro )
Kyro is a serialization format like protobuf, but java only. Kyro/Net is a java only RPC implementation using Kryo messages. So it's not a good choice for "cross-language-ness" communication.
Today it would seem that ICE http://www.zeroc.com/, and Thrift which provides an RPC implementation out of the box, are the best cross-language RPC implementations out there.