Fast Infoset

Fast Infoset

Fast Infoset is an alternative encoding of the XML object model. Normally an XML document is written in plain text, just as we've seen throughout this book. With Fast Infoset, however, a binary, nonhuman readable, file format is used. In exchange for the loss of human readability, Fast Infoset-encoded documents are significantly smaller and require less processing effort to parse. The Fast Infoset specification is defined by two different standards bodies: the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the International Organization for Standards (ISO). There is an open source Java implementation of Fast Infoset at https://fi.dev.java.net. This implementation is included in the Java Web Services Developer Pack discussed in Chapter 11.