New binary layouts

[Matt Sicker <bo...@gmail.com>]

I made a ticket recently to add an AvroLayout. There are numerous other
alternative libraries for binary serialization which are generally faster
and better supported than Java serialization, though they all require
additional dependencies.

I also have an idea on abstracting out many of the structured list of trees
style layouts (e.g., all the Jackson layouts) into some sort of visitor
pattern to allow for much easier addition of analogous structured layouts.
Providing a basic DTO that can be serialized and deserialized using various
libraries would be handy here.

Besides Avro, what are some other suggested formats we might want to
evaluate? I know of Kryo, Thrift, and Protobuf, and there are at least 10
JSON-like binary codecs out in the wild as well (including BSON which we
already use in our MongoDB appender).

-- 
Matt Sicker <bo...@gmail.com>