the spring framework has long supported a consistant raft of RPC mechanisms with its Service Exporters. As of Spring 3.0, it's also provided a nice SPI to support arbitrary serializers (marshallers, or, more properly, HttpMessageConverters) in the REST support provided by the framework.

Both of these mechanisms are powerful, and expose flexible SPIs that can be used to teach Spring new tricks.

This is particularly valuable in the world of serializers and RPC mechanisms, which tend to move much quicker than individual Spring framework releases. For example, Cassandra (itself only a 0.7 project!) has already had a full integration with Thrift and has now moved on to support Avro. Ex-Googler Dhanji Prasana called (http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye) Google's Protocol Buffers (which Google's used over a few iterations for years) an "ancient, creaking dinosaurs" compared to MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop.

So, understanding that the space is too voilatile to try to track in Spring proper, I've started building these implementations.

todo: the support defined here should work for: -- service exporters (where possible) -- HttpMessageConverters (REST serialization) -- JMS MessageConverters -- AMQP MessageConverters

serialization technologies to support include: -- Avro -- Thrift -- MessagePack -- Google Protocol Buffers

RPC technologies include -- JBoss Remoting -- MessagePack RPC -- Thrift RPC -- Avro -- Netty?

Approach New Note 5

Build Spring OBM -- object-to-binary marshallers. this would let you then build ONE JMS MessageConverter and ONE AMQP MessageConverter and ONE HttpMessageConverter and then delegate to the object-to-binary marshaller and unmarshaller, a la Spring OXM