Question

If I have a bunch of servers (eventually groups of servers), each being a different service (SOA), and I want them to be able to:

• Send requests, receive responses via TCP over a high-throughput, low-latency, unmetered network.
• Use a common message format that:
  • Is fast to encode and decode/parse
  • Supports lists and binary strings
  • Won’t necessarily require updating all services at once (e.g. adding a field should not prevent the outdated services from reading the message and picking out all of the fields they are expecting)

Which format would you guys recommend? I’m currently looking into encoding messages as BSON, but would like to hear some suggestions.

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

Thanks to @Radu’s comment for this answer.

• MessagePack
• Google’s Protocol Buffers
• Thrift

are all great options. More info here.