The new XML: High Performance Serializers

While JSON has been regarded for some time as a good alternative to XML, binary data serializers such as Thrift and Protocol Buffers have more recently been gaining traction for their performance and compact output. Just the other day I came across Avro (now part of the Hadoop project) which puts itself as a direct competitor to Thrift and ProtoBufs.  Avro looks neat, but there are a few other data marshallers worth looking at too.