[Xml-bin] Status of projects?

[Anders W. Tell]

Al Snell wrote:

>On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Stefan Zier wrote:
>
>>How's everybody else doing?
>>
Just fine.

>
>I've put my original idea of a serialised stream of SAX events on hold
>since others are working on that already, and am concentrating on the
>ASN.1/XML stuff.
>
Im one of those peoples :-) and I recently got working prototypes of the 
major four types of XML Information Set representations up and running. 
<http://openebxml.sourceforge.net/projects/bml/BML-design.html>

Im finishing of a project this week and expect to work fulltime on BML 
and running/coordinating the Open ebXML project. 
<http://openebxml.sourceforge.net>

So version 0.4 "Tree API" version should be out shortly and the 
following version 0.5 should be feature-complete  with support for all 
datatypes.
The following versions should focus on performance, completness, error 
handling and testing.

The great masterplan is to use BML-trees to contain MIME Multipart 
messages in Open ebXML software components, i.e. similar to what 
Microsoft is proposing with DIME. but BML also handles other usecases 
and allows for parsed XML.

> 
>It's going well - the big meeting is in Bangalore, India, at the end of
>August, but for now we're throwing ideas around on a mailing list to
>decide what areas we'll need to cover at the meeting. The potential is
>going to be amazing... using an encoding like PER that assumes the
>receiver has ful knowledge of the schema in use and as such sends no
>redundant information (designed for performance-criticial applications),
>an XML document will be squeezed down such that, for example, an attribute
>with four possible values will be encoded in just two bits. 
>
Yes, It looks as a killer usecase for PER based XML encodings.

What is your take on the slightly different usecase with IPC 
(interprocess communication) where the information transferred 
originates from objects.
Isnt it more efficient to use pure Corba (CDR) or native ASN (BER, 
PER,..) than XML encode the information first and then do a PER encoding ?


>The result
>will still be amenable to gzip if bandwidth is more crucial than CPU power
>and memory, since it will contain all the CDATA as-is, and CDATA generally
>compresses well.
>
Interesting, it will be great to see your final solutions.

BML differs from ASN based encodings in that NO knowledge of schemas is 
required, the focus is clearly on the  end-to-end performance aspect and 
it is based on CDR.

Im have however added a GZIP based  character compression mechanism but 
the resulting compression doesn work as one might expect. What I did was 
to separate characters from markup and encode the GZIP'ed characters 
into the stream, but GZIP'ing the whole BML stream is usually more 
size-effective.

Cheers
/anders

-- 
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/        Anders W. Tell   ,   Financial Toolsmiths AB         / 
/ email: <anderst@toolsmiths.se>  <http://www.toolsmiths.se>  /
/ BML: http://openebxml.sourceforge.net/Projects/BML/bml.html /
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