[This message was posted by David Rosenborg of Pantor Engineering AB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to the "FAST Protocol" discussion forum at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/46. You can reply to it on-line at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/805a6cd4 - PLEASE DO NOT REPLY BY MAIL.]
Complexity isn't in itself a definitive term. It's arguably easier for a human to get a grasp of a tag/value rendition of a message than by looking at a hexdump of the same message encoded as FAST. FIXML would from that perspective look even less complex since you wouldn't need to know the tag numbers by heart (though some would certainly be blinded by all the pointy brackets and verbosity :-). However, if you're about to implement an encoder or a decoder, a self describing format will probably give you a jump start. Being able to "see" the encoding helps, but in the longer run I'd say that there are other aspects that matter more, like for example consistency, predictability and clarity. Complexity is also relative. Creating a naïve processor for either FAST or FIX tag/value isn't a particularly great challenge. You'll need to get more friendly with your hexdumper in the FAST case, but you'll catch up when you get to the details. On the other hand, creating a high-performing, robust and flexible processor is a complex task for all of these encodings. From my experience, most of the development efforts in such cases won't be devoted to understanding the encodings per se, but to figure out how to waste the least number of cycles in the CPU while still maintaining an intuitive and flexible interface to the application. And this part gets easier the less wiggle room the encoding presents. /David > Compared to ASCII FIX, TLV message formats FAST *is* complex. My view is > that FAST was designed to solve a problem of bandwidth problem and it > does that extremely well by using every trick in the book (for want of a > better phrase). However this does make it a lot more complex than non- > compressed self describing message structures. [You can unsubscribe from this discussion group by sending a message to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Financial Information eXchange" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/FIX-Protocol?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
