Serialization Formats
Data architecture technologies for row-oriented encodings with schemas for records in motion — events, messages, and APIs.
Serialization and RPC generated for fifteen languages at once
Serialization Formats
Apache Thrift is a cross-language services framework: an interface definition language and code generator that emit both the serialization code and the RPC client and server for more than a dozen languages, with pluggable protocols and transports underneath.
The wire format is the in-memory format — no decoding step
Serialization Formats
Cap'n Proto is an MIT-licensed binary interchange format and capability-based RPC system from the author of Protocol Buffers version 2, designed so that the encoded bytes are directly usable in memory — there is no parse step between receiving a message and reading a field.
Read fields straight out of the buffer, with no heap at all
Serialization Formats
FlatBuffers is Google's Apache-2.0 cross-platform serialization library, built for performance-critical code: data is accessed directly in the serialized buffer without unpacking, the only memory needed is the buffer itself, and schemas evolve with forwards and backwards compatibility.
The contract layer for the encoding everything already speaks
Serialization Formats
JSON Schema is the vocabulary for describing, validating, and documenting JSON data — the third schema type every major schema registry supports alongside Avro and Protocol Buffers, and the one that requires no new encoding on the wire.
Row-oriented serialization with first-class schema evolution
Serialization Formats
Apache Avro is a compact, schema-based, row-oriented serialization format — the default encoding for Kafka pipelines and schema-registry workflows.
Compact, typed serialization from the gRPC ecosystem
Serialization Formats
Protocol Buffers (protobuf) is Google's language-neutral, schema-first binary serialization format, ubiquitous in service APIs and increasingly present in event streams.