Fast Infoset

Compression and faster parsing of XML documents, based on ITU-T Rec. X.891 and ISO/IEC 24824-1, also known as Fast Infoset.

Fast Infoset, an international standard (ITU-T Rec. X.891 and ISO/IEC 24824-1), is a binary representation of the information contained in an XML document. Fast Infoset documents are generally smaller in size and faster to read and write than equivalent XML documents. This is especially important if such documents are to be sent over a network, or processed on resource constrained devices.

Smaller Documents, Faster Parsing

The information contained in any valid XML document can be represented in a Fast Infoset document. While all information is preserved when converting an XML document into a Fast Infoset document, the exact formatting of the XML document (such as the ordering of attributes within an element) is lost. Depending on the content of an XML document, the equivalent Fast Infoset document can be one quarter the size of the original XML document, or even less. Parsing a Fast Infoset document is two to four times faster than parsing an equivalent XML document.

Benefits and Features

• compress XML documents
• based on and integrated with the XML library from the POCO C++ Libraries
• supports event-based (SAX) and document tree-based (DOM) parsing, as well as creation of Fast Infoset documents
• verified interoperability with other Fast Infoset implementations, for transferring documents between C++, Java and .NET applications
• easy to use APIs and tools for converting an XML document into a Fast Infoset document and vice versa
• support for Fast Infoset encoding algorithms (hex, dword/base64, short, int, long, bool, float, double, CDATA and UUID) and restricted alphabets