11 March 2009

Of note: RMI libraries

Article via Reddit comparing the Thrift RMI protocol developed by Facebook and open sourced to the Apache project, and Google's protocol buffers protocol released under BSD. The primary benefit of both is that they're much (much) leaner than XML and SOAP. The interesting point of the linked article was that (with the implementations used...) using compressed JSON was faster. Neat.

I've never been impressed by the incessant bitching from developers who decry the bloat of SOAP. I can understand the potential need, but I suspect that most of the time we're fighting server speed and not throughput. Slashdot discussed Thrift two years ago. There are a few gems in the comments--albeit buried under the usual jags about NIH syndrome. Meh. Many good libraries come out of NIH along with many bad ones. I know I've benefitted greatly from open source so, like the argument against "useless blogs," useless code is harmless when ignored.

[ posted by sstrader on 11 March 2009 at 4:27:41 PM in Programming ]