On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Eric Evans <eev...@rackspace.com> wrote: > On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 11:00 -0700, Paul Brown wrote: >> At the risk of asking about religion (but with no interest in hearing >> about it), why Avro instead of something like plain-old-JSON over >> HTTP? > > At the risk of having this thread veer off on a very long tangent... > > In a nutshell, we need a way of processing requests and responses over > the network with typed data. You could of course put something together > to do this using JSON and HTTP, but not without reimplementing another > framework like Avro or Thrift (both of which can do JSON encoding, and > both of which have an HTTP transport).
Not that I wanted to criticize choices, but do they actually allow use of JSON as encoding? Avro does use JSON for specifying schemas, but I wasn't aware of being able to use it for encoding data. Likewise with Thrift. I think there's also important question of whether schemas/formatting choice for payload should follow that of framing. Avro/Thrift/PB seem reasonable for framing, use by protocol itself; but for open payload it might make sense to allow different pluggable formats. Mostly because Avro/Thrift/PB are schema-bound formats which is not an optimal choice for many use cases (but are fine for many others) It is of course possible to just use byte[]/String as payload, handle encoding and decoding on client end, and maybe that's how it should be, for cases where strict schema doesn't work for use cases. -+ Tatu +-
