Data types for cross language access

[Oliver Dungey]

I am currently working on a system with Cassandra that is written purely in
Java. I know our end solution will require other languages to access the
data in Cassandra (Python, C++ etc.). What is the best way to store data to
ensure I can do this? Should I serialize everything to strings/json/xml
prior to the byte conversion? We currently use the Hector serializer, I
wondered if we should just switch this to something like Jackson/JAXB? Any
thoughts very welcome.