Java - .Net object interchange, not web-based

Question

I have a client-server system implemented in C#, and the client and server exchange .Net objects via serialization / deserialization and communicating via TCP/IP. This runs on a

Answer 1

I would suggest either JSON or XML (which is based on a .xsd file) because these are independent of their respective implementations (instead of something like an ObjectOutputStream in java).

The problem of having this format between the two components (client and server) is that they need to be at the same version. My best practice is to have one underlying definition of the format (i use xml with an xsd file which specifies how the xml has to look like), then use jaxb to generated java classes. That way you can (un)marshal from/to xml in the java part.

I am very sure a similar thing exists in the world of .NET.

JSON is smaller than xml in size, i find xml to be more readable.