There's a (pretty) good comparison of Thrift to Protobuf on http://wiki.github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/ http://wiki.github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/ I thi

There's a (pretty) good comparison of Thrift to Protobuf on http://wiki.github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/ http://wiki.github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/ I think Thrift supports a lot more languages, but based on benchmarks, I believe it does perform (sometimes significantly) slower I've never used Hessian though, will have to check it out at some point.