I'm with you on this. When Thrift came out, it kind of made sense, because there wasn't really anything quite like it (closest I'd say was Hessian) in terms of

I'm with you on this. When Thrift came out, it kind of made sense, because there wasn't really anything quite like it (closest I'd say was Hessian) in terms of the mix of simplicity, performance, etc. When Protocol Buffers came out, it kind of made sense, because Google had worked on it prior to Thrift even existing (indeed, it inspired Thrift). When Avro came out, I was like, WTF!? This is making that mistake yet again!! EDIT: Damn, I forgot to mention MessagePack. ;-)