[bobwyman]

Eugene, I wasn't actually a formal member of the standards committee, however, since my products at DEC (ALL-IN-1 mail, etc.) were some of the earliest to use ASN.1, I was very involved in the standardization process. ASN.1 is everywhere whether or not people realize it. Just about all telecommunications systems (cell phones, etc.) use it internally. As you say, SSL uses it -- since public key certificates are encoded in a form of ASN.1 also the IETF SNMP protocol relies on ASN.1. Other examples would include X.400 and X.500 standards and the LDAP which is a simplified version of X.500. You may be interested to know that internally at Google, we use the "Protocol Buffer" format instead of XML for all internal processing. That format is, like ASN.1 a "tag/length/value" binary encoding. For more information see: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/

[eugenejen]

Bob, I know that. and Facebook uses Thrift which is now part of Apache incubator project. I may need to deal with some large data set with Cassandra database, which communicates with external programs in Thrift format messages.

As a side note, I hope Google will finish real time search api soon and open the firehose :-)