[9fans] Thrift RPC

[Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>]

I've just been enlightened by a friend of mine who explained
to me that binary RPC is still alive and kicking:
      http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/
      http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/static/thrift-20070401.pdf
and, of course, nothing in CS is complete these days unless
there's somebody at Google working on it:
     http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers

Am I totally missing something or hasn't been the binary RPC
of that style been dead ever since SUNRPC? Hasn't the eulogy
been delivered by CORBA? Haven't folks realized that S-exprs
are really quite good for data serialization in the heterogeneous
environments (especially when they are called JSON) and you
really shouldn't be made to figure out how large is the integer
on a host foo?

Thanks,
Roman.