I'm working on a project where I'll be sending lots of binary data (several images in one message) over HTTP POST to a RESTful interface. I've looked into alternatives such as JSON, protobuff, thrift but found no conclusive comparisons of overhead introduced by these formats. Which one would you prefer to use in this case?
It's probably most efficient to not encode it at all, set the appropriate Content-Type and Content-Length headers and then just send it over the HTTP connection as the POST's body.