Data interchange formats

Modern software architecture tends to split an application into several components. Whether you embrace the service-oriented architecture paradigm, or you push it even further into the microservices realm, these components will have to exchange data. But even if you are coding a monolithic application, whose code base is contained in one project, chances are that you have to still exchange data with APIs, other programs, or simply handle the data flow between the frontend and the backend part of your website, which very likely won't speak the same language.

Choosing the right format in which to exchange information is crucial. A language-specific format has the advantage that the language itself is very likely to provide you with all the tools to make serialization and deserialization a breeze. However, you will lose the ability to talk to other components that have been written in different versions of the same language, or in different languages altogether. Regardless...