When we talk about data interchange in web applications, JSON is the de-facto standard, especially in developing RESTful web services. JSON won against its antagonist XML (SOAP) without a battle, but it didn’t prevent the development of alternatives like Google’s Protocol Buffers, Apache Avro or MessagePack. In being thorough, we should also mention gzip JSON compression (sometimes called “JSONC”), and BSON, a binary-encoded serialization of JSON-like documents, both derived directly from JSON. In this article we’ll discuss MessagePack in depth.