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FWIW, I think this will make it much easier to implement drivers. Getting protobufs to work is a real pain.

It will make it on par with the interface for other document oriented databases. I think it will be a lot more user friendly then the protobuf, and it might be the best that Java can do.

Sounds like that would work well - it's the approach ElasticSearch has taken with their APIs and they're generally very nice to use.

To clarify, in 1.13 JSON will be a communication protocol for queries. It's not intended to be used by the end user, but by the client drivers. You can use it as an end user, but it isn't nearly as nice as native language drivers.

The change is meant to simplify driver development, packaging, and improve performance. Protobuf is worse than JSON in almost all of these categories.