Is there a "standard" text representation for Thrift like there is for protobuf? (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/reference/cpp/google.protobuf.text_format.html).
This is just for debugging purposes and I am assuming the whoever wants to translate a binary message to its text equivalent has access to the thrift definition file.
Found one possible response to my own question. There is one base "protocol" supported in Thrift that serializes structures in JSON format.
In C# appears in as TJSONProtocol descending from TProtocol (http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/thrift/tags/thrift-0.5.0/lib/csharp/src/Protocol/TJSONProtocol.cs). I haven't checked all of them, but at least java and c++ implementations are also currently available.