Noteworthy developments with Smile ("binary JSON") format

[tsaloranta]

[cc:ed to Jackson-dev as well]

In addition to incrementa core Smile codecl work within Jackson (for
Java encoder/decoder), there are other cool things happening, so I
thought I'd share them:

- Adoption is increasing, even though usage is often of "guerilla"
variety (i.e. not widely advertised) -- I was happy to meet Ed at
cassandra SF2011 conference and learn about his usage. And at my work
place (Ning) we are rolling out major changes to analytics pipeline
which will mostly replace existing Thrift usage with Smile, and are
expecting nice time/space improvements as a result (esp. since Thrift
version in use, 0.2, is old)
- Interoperability should be increasing by tooling improvements, such
as:
+ Pierre from Ning submitted a patch for Unix 'file' utility, to
recognize file encoded data, and display basic header information --
this should be very useful for problem diagnostics
+ Jackson 1.8 has basic format auto-detection which allows
constructing JsonParser from "unknown" content: so far JSON, Smile and
XML formats are detected, and all new FasterXML provided modules
should support this as well (for CSV, Thrift, Avro)
+ Jackson 1.8 and above include "smile tool" (see
http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonDownload), which is just a simple Jar
that can be used decode Smile files, output as JSON
- There is again some momentum on C-version of Smile codec, Pierre is
continuing where Brian left off a while ago -- this may be long
process, but once we do have good C implementation, it should be bit
easier to provide bindings to many scripting languages.

I would also be interested in learning what others are doing with
Smile, please share!

-+ Tatu +-