Several such “wire formats” exist, ranging from text-based standards such as YAML, JSON or XML, to binary options such as Protobuf that incorporate metadata or are completely raw.Īt Chronicle Software we have developed a number of libraries to support the building of applications that are optimised for low latency messaging, primarily in the financial services industry. The most common solution to this problem is to define a “canonical” representation of data that is understood between processes - even between programming languages - and have data translated into this format before sending and then back into the receiver’s own format once received.

Even in Java, where we may consider ourselves “protected” from this kind of situation, there is no requirement that two different JVM implementations or different versions from the same vendor use the same internal representation for objects.

Simply copying bytes from one component to another is not enough. Things are complicated further when we consider that different hardware/system architectures are likely to have different ways of representing the “same” values. This may seem straightforward but remember that the communicating components may have been written in completely different languages.

one that is part of a different process) is received correctly, with the same values. We must ensure that data sent by a component to a “remote” component (i.e. One of the most important issues when building distributed applications is that of data representation.

Kotlin serializable data class