Thrift, Avro, Protocolbuffers - Are they all dead?
<p>Working on a pet project (cassandra, spark, hadoop, kafka) I need a data serialization framework. Checking out the common three frameworks - namely Thrift, Avro and Protocolbuffers - I noticed most of them seem to be dead-alive having 2 minor releases a year at most.</p>

<p>This leaves me with two assumptions:</p>

<ul>
<li>They are as complete as such a framework should be and just rest in maintenance mode as long as no new features are needed</li>
<li>There is no reason to exist for such framework - not being obvious to me why. If so, what alternatives are out there?</li>
</ul>

<p>If anyone could give me a hint to my assumptions, any input is welcome.</p>