At one company I worked at, we used Avro to transfer data over the network. It's strongly typed with schemas, and it has both a compact binary form for transfer

At one company I worked at, we used Avro to transfer data over the network. It's strongly typed with schemas, and it has both a compact binary form for transfer over the network and a text-based form for storage on disk that looks like JSON except field order matters (the schema and data are stored in separate files).