a friend made me aware of MessagePack today: http://msgpack.org/
do any of you have any experience with this? one interesting thing about it is that the IDL compiler was written i Ruby -- which may make it easy to run on JRuby and create a Maven plugin for compiling IDLs. the project appears to be relatively young so I guess it remains to be seen where it'll end up in the gallery of serialization and RPC mechanisms. if any of you have any experience with it as a replacement for Thrift I'd be interesting in hearing your thoughts. (the Thrift compiler is a bit of a pain in the butt in a cross platform environment. in particular when one of those platforms is Windows) -Bjørn
