Simon Willison’s Weblog

Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC. Justification for inventing a brand new serialisation protocol: Thrift and Protocol Buffers both use IDLs and code generation, XML “is not convertible to a simple unambiguous data structure in any language I’ve ever used” and JSON lacks support for unencoded binary data. The result is BERT—Binary ERlang Term—which extracts a format from Erlang in much the same way that JSON extracted one from JavaScript.

# 21st October 2009, 10:11 pm / bert, erlang, github, javascript, json, protocolbuffers, serialisation, thrift, xml

simple-thrift-queue (via) Phillip Pearson’s surprisingly concise in-memory message queue written in Python using Facebook’s Thrift library (which is similar to Protocol Buffers, but was open sourced much earlier on). Handles 4,000 requests per second on a laptop.

# 4th August 2008, 12:27 pm / facebook, message-queues, messaging, phillip-pearson, protocolbuffers, python, thrift