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The purpose of this project is to compare various message passing, and serialization formats.

We are exploring a replacement for the current socket implementation.

Message passing technologies that we are investigating:

• ØMQ - http://www.zeromq.org/
• BEEP - http://beepcore.org/

Serialization formats:

• ProtoBuf http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/
• XDR http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4506
• JSON http://www.json.org/
• XML http://www.w3.org/XML/
• JSON.net http://json.codeplex.com/
• MessagePack http://msgpack.org/
• Thrift http://thrift.apache.org/
• BERT & BERT-RPC http://bert-rpc.org/

Requirements:

• Fast. We need to send thousands of messages per second. Total round-trip time including formatting and parsing of messages is paramount.
• Cross-platform. We need to be able to access these systems from Windows, Mac and Linux. Using code written in C#, C++, Ruby. Access from Javascript would be a plus.
• Low friction for implementors. We'll provide some client libs for languages we use, but there shouldn't be heavy-handed requirements for 3rd parties or OEMs.

Nice-to-haves:

• Human Readable. Being able to read the wire level messages without additional tools would be nice.