One IT Engineer

There are many cases we need to send data from one application to another. Usually we will need data serialization.

There are many data serialization formats availale now:

String-based serialised formats

XML, JSON, YAML, etc…

Binary-based serialised formats

BASE64, protobuf, etc…

There are several things we should consider to choose one or not:

1. capability

is this format are powerful enough to support my data?

2. compatibility

my data might be changed in the future, is this format provide such features to enable data evolvement?

3. available toolkits

we are using one programing language. when we are taking the advantage of the language, we are also limited.

4. effeciency

usually this is related to toolkits heavily

* encode time
* decode time
* transmission time
* overhead

There is lots of attempts trying to fingure out which one is better:

http://webignition.net/articles/xml-vs-yaml-vs-json-a-study-to-find-answers/

http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=885271