Data Transparency: Why You Should Care

Cross-posting from my RTI blog:

Most other messaging systems do one of the following instead:

1. Use opaque data only, and make the application handle marshalling/serialization itself, including data encapsulation, endianness conversions, and the like.
2. Include complete data structure information with every message, including the names and types of any fields it contains.

Multi-vendor interoperability is fiction without some kind of type system, which disqualifies (1). How can I so much as send you a single string of text if we can’t agree whether that string should be length-prefixed or NUL-terminated, how wide the characters should be, or what encoding they should use? But self-describing messages are awfully heavy on the network, and they fail to capture generalities that already exist in your system.

Read the whole post here.