Major Description
Source: http://www.protostuff.io/
It based on protobuf but has some optimizations and some cool things like runtime serialization graph of objects (like Hessian). So we shouldn't define proto files although it might increase efficiency. And it work well with Java8 Date and Time types. It is also an alive project.
Here is some benchmarks. Take a look at Full Object Graph Serializers section.
http://hperadin.github.io/jvm-serializers-report/report.html
https://github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/wiki
I've also forked one repo and added Hessian to comparison https://github.com/thinline72/protostuff-example
Here is my results:
Benchmark for 1000000 objects (includes both serialization and deserialization)
jdk : 3,428 s
jackson : 575,2 ms
fasterxml : 503,5 ms
protobuf : 257,9 ms
protostuff : 215,5 ms
kryo : 390,5 ms
hessian : 3,234 s