Alexander Philippou

Greenhorn
+ Follow
since Jun 01, 2010
Merit badge: grant badges
For More
Cows and Likes
Cows
Total received
0
In last 30 days
0
Total given
0
Likes
Total received
0
Received in last 30 days
0
Total given
0
Given in last 30 days
0
Forums and Threads
Scavenger Hunt
expand Ranch Hand Scavenger Hunt
expand Greenhorn Scavenger Hunt

Recent posts by Alexander Philippou

Fast Infoset is an ITU-T / ISO standard which specifies a binary encoding of the W3C XML Information Set. It can be used instead of text XML without making changes to your code other than switching the message encoding from text XML to Fast Infoset. Both text XML and Fast Infoset are encodings of XML Infoset, and both can be used to format Web services messages for transmission over the wire. The receiving side will construct the same XML Infoset from the message it receives irrespective of the whether text XML or Fast Infoset was used as message encoding.

A Fast Infoset document can be represented as human readable text XML at any moment without any prior knowledge of the structure of the data it contains. Compared to text XML, Fast Infoset produces a much more compact encoding and significantly improves performance. Fast Infoset is the most unobtrusive and widely interoperable way of increasing performance and reducing bandwith consumption without requiring changes other than switching the message encoding from text XML to Fast Infoset.

Protocol buffers is a format for data serialization and requires full knowledge of the structure of the contained data in order to be deserialized.

There is a common confusion between the terms "encoding" and "compression". A compression algorithm is always applied on an already encoded document; if you have a data set in memory, you must first encode it using text XML or Fast Infoset or protobuf etc before you can compress it. Neither Fast Infoset nor protobuf are compression algorithms and so it is pointless to compare them to GZIP. Actually when you are making such a comparison (i.e. Fast Infoset vs GZIP) what you are actually comparing is (a) a Fast Infoset-encoded document, versus (b) a text XML-encoded document which has been compressed using GZIP. To make a meaningful comparison, (a) encode a series of Web services messages using text XML and then compress them using GZIP, and (b) encode the same series of Web services messages using Fast Infoset and then compress then using GZIP. Most Java app servers support both Fast Infoset and GZIP compression of response messages. Keep in mind that compression is quite processor intensive and that the processing penalty it introduces is largely dependent on the size of the message to be compressed; since Fast Infoset-encoded messages are typically about 25% of the size of the same messages when text XML-encoded, it is obvious that compressing Fast Infoset messages results in a comparable lower processing penalty.

Finally, when performing your benchmarking or compactness measurements, be sure to always use real data. Messages of different size, different structure or different content will return different results.
13 years ago