Binary formats have their drawbacks - the guy that designed the AMQP protocol called the wire protocol he designed for it an "expert mistake". Admittedly he was

Binary formats have their drawbacks - the guy that designed the AMQP protocol called the wire protocol he designed for it an "expert mistake". Admittedly he was designing a spec rather than a product but worth understanding. Source is a long but very interesting read about messaging, amqp, zeromq and others: http://www.imatix.com/articles:whats-wrong-with-amqp http://www.imatix.com/articles:whats-wrong-with-amqp