Having used protobufs, they are not magic. Sure they're faster to iterate and use than HTTP but not significantly so in many use cases. They still marshall/unm

Having used protobufs, they are not magic. Sure they're faster to iterate and use than HTTP but not significantly so in many use cases. They still marshall/unmarshall but they do a better job hiding it from you. The network is still unreliable, insecure, slow, etc. and so will still have many of the same failure modes as HTTP. A better Corba is still Corba... Whether you call it XMLRPC, RESTful, protobufs, Thrift, Hessian or what have you. And goddamn I hate the optionality of all fields that is "best practice" with protobufs. It makes processing any somewhat complicated data structure a PITA.