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Not to take away from thrift in any way but could you not do this already using any portable serialisation method? Json has c++ and JavaScript (de)serialisation implementations as does XML. Combined with a Rest-ful web service api surely it doesn't matter what the transport mechanism is?

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JSON does not work well for binary data. BJSON tries to fix this, but in languages like C++ you will still have to deal with clumsy parser syntax when you deserialize your stuff. It's much more convenient to have native classes representing protocol objects in your language (protocol compiler generates them for you).

I guess their focus was on speed. XML is pretty slow and verbose, and whilst JSON is better, it's not the best solution. MongoDB's BSON is quite cool though.

Web Services and the associated HTTP headers are relatively slow, but browsers can make them, so are kind of necessary.

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