Fast Infoset

Fast Infoset is a binary encoding format for XML (Extensible Markup Language) that aims to provide more efficient serialization and deserialization of XML data. It is designed to reduce the size of XML documents and improve processing speed, making it suitable for applications where performance and bandwidth are critical.

Overview

Fast Infoset is defined by the ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector) and the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) under the standard ITU-T Rec. X.891 | ISO/IEC 24824-1. It provides a way to encode XML documents in a binary format, which can be more compact and faster to process than traditional text-based XML.

Features

• Compactness: Fast Infoset reduces the size of XML documents by using binary encoding, which can significantly decrease the amount of data that needs to be transmitted or stored.
• Speed: The binary format allows for faster parsing and generation of XML documents, improving the performance of applications that handle large amounts of XML data.
• Interoperability: Fast Infoset is designed to be interoperable with existing XML technologies and can be used alongside traditional XML parsers and tools.
• Schema Support: It supports XML Schema, allowing for the validation of binary-encoded XML documents against a schema.

Applications

Fast Infoset is used in various applications where performance and efficiency are critical, such as:

• Web Services: Enhancing the performance of web services by reducing the size of SOAP messages.
• Mobile Devices: Optimizing data transmission and processing on devices with limited resources.
• Real-time Systems: Improving the efficiency of real-time data exchange in systems that require low latency.

Related Technologies

• XML
• Binary XML
• Efficient XML Interchange (EXI)
• SOAP
• Web Services

See Also

• ITU-T
• ISO
• XML Schema
• Serialization
• Deserialization