There has been a lot of activity around serialization techniques for Java in the past couple of years, Thrift being one. One (of several) comparison websites http://code.google.com/p/thrift-protobuf-compare/wiki/Benchmarking
Some of these are serialization-only, others include a mechanism for RPC as well. Most aim to work across-languages as well. I've been thinking of plugging one or another of these into our Jini invocation stack but as serialization is not a bottleneck in our system, and we don't need cross-language invocation, I haven't gotten around to it. Am interested in hearing if anyone works on this, though. Patrick
