Blog post comparing Avro and Protocol Buffers

[Jeff Hammerbacher <ha...@cloudera.com>]

In case you missed it: http://www.sammur.com/?p=36

My reply, currently awaiting moderation:

"""

Hey,

I think you are using an old version of Avro; in addition to C, Java, and
Python implementations, there are Ruby and C++ implementations, and a C# one
on the way (see
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-533)<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-533%29>
.

Also, for maintainability, you don’t have to write your protocols or schemas
in JSON; see http://avro.apache.org/docs/current/genavro.html for details
and
http://github.com/hammer/hbase-trunk-with-avro/blob/trunk/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/avro/hbase.genavrofor
an example.

Lastly, your point about type safety makes me think you are using the
generic (no code generation, only use built-in data types) rather than
specific (generate code, including objects corresponding to complex Avro
types) implementation. You should be able to get compile-time type checks
from the latter.

In any case, Avro is certainly a less mature project than protocol buffers,
but it’s also actively developed. Please submit any suggestions for
improvements to the mailing lists (http://avro.apache.org/mailing_lists.html
).

Regards,
Jeff

"""
Please hop in if you have more thoughts to add. In any case, it certainly
looks like we could improve the documentation.

Thanks,
Jeff