(cc:ing to woodstox-users/dev, since it is related to Woodstox too...
as well as Aalto)

Apologies for posting this again, but I think that it's good to check out:

http://code.google.com/p/thrift-protobuf-compare/wiki/Benchmarking

since there have been some changes, more things compared and so on.

So while it's not 100% clear which is fastest choice (Protocol
Buffers, Thrift or Json with Jackson), it's safe to say that
performance differences between these candidates are not huge. And
that's sort of amazing, considering how many things one has to give up
when using non-self-descriptive binary formats, without getting
order-of-magnitude faster performance. :)

Of course all the usual disclaimers apply: benchmarks are always
unfair, not relevant to all use cases and so on.
But at least here code is open source, methodology is simple,
repeatable, and implementations chosen are best-of-breed for data
formats.

-+ Tatu +-