I made a ticket recently to add an AvroLayout. There are numerous other alternative libraries for binary serialization which are generally faster and better supported than Java serialization, though they all require additional dependencies.
I also have an idea on abstracting out many of the structured list of trees style layouts (e.g., all the Jackson layouts) into some sort of visitor pattern to allow for much easier addition of analogous structured layouts. Providing a basic DTO that can be serialized and deserialized using various libraries would be handy here. Besides Avro, what are some other suggested formats we might want to evaluate? I know of Kryo, Thrift, and Protobuf, and there are at least 10 JSON-like binary codecs out in the wild as well (including BSON which we already use in our MongoDB appender). -- Matt Sicker <boa...@gmail.com>
