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I use rabbitmq for my android app. It's just a matter of sending a byte array between the client and the server. Then it's just a matter of reading the bytes into the appropriate fields. (both server and client) This may be a bit of work but it's really fast and efficient.

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After several releases of your app, you'll have several wire formats in the wild. One of the main features of libraries like Protocol Buffers is that they can parse old messages, so you don't need to maintain an increasingly hairier parsing routine.

Well, I deny access to the old clients. I consider this an advantage because I force users to keep up to date. If you're careful you can just add items to the end of the stream and the old clients will work just fine. I don't support this though, but I do it in practice.

But yeah, protobuf wins in that domain. Specially if it avoids a high serialization/deserialization overhead penalty. It'd be cool to use rabbitmq to route the protobuf objects around with a cleaner interface.

Shameless plug for my dev blog: http://developingthedream.blogspot.com/

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