Is there a way to store typed values (e.g., float, integer) in HBase and access these values from different clients? 
The Java client examples I've found uses the static methods of Bytes class to manually encode and decode the values. I haven't found any Thrift client examples which stores typed values. hbase.thrift doesn't specify and float, integer types. 
In short, I'm ready to store the type of fields in an external resource. I just want to be able to write from one client (e.g. Java), read from another (e.g. shell or Thrift via Python) without having to worry about the binary encoding issues. If that's not possible, I'd like to learn the best practices in encoding/decoding for multiple clients.
Thanks.
No; HBase stores bytes, nothing more. Any further encoding or decoding must be done by you.
Storing typed values in HBase