Hi, Stanley A. Klein wrote: > On Wed, July 15, 2009 1:37 pm, Henry S. Thompson wrote: >> Stanley A. Klein writes: >> >>> Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) is moving toward adoption by W3C. It >>> provides a format for efficiently representing XML documents with >>> schema-informed and schema-less modes. >>> >>> There is an open-source Java implementation available. >>> >>> Is anyone working to implement EXI in Python? >> >> Don't get me wrong, I think EXI is useful, in the right places, but, >> could I ask, why would you want to implement it in Python? I'd be >> very surprised if any Python XML application is spending anything like >> enough time in the raw parsing activity (as opposed to the >> structure-building activity) to make the marginal gain you might get >> from EXI worth it. . . >> >> EXI is, IMO, for closely coupled systems in particular messaging >> environments where every bit counts, and I guess I'm having difficulty >> imagining Python in such a context. . . > > EXI is for data interchange. That can mean messaging or document/data > storage. SOAP messages are very verbose, and SOAP messaging can benefit > from EXI, especially if the communications channels have bandwidth or > transit time considerations. > > SOAP is increasingly being considered in a > variety of control system applications for which Python makes sense as an > implementation language. Similarly, scientific applications involving > large amounts of XML-formatted data could benefit from EXI in storing the > data or interchanging it for purposes such as grid processing. > > The original application that contributed the technology for EXI was > sending web pages to cell phones. > > In general, any applications implemented in Python that involves > messaging > or data storage with either bandwidth or storage volume concerns could > benefit from EXI. And as best I know there are a growing number of such > applications implemented in Python.
Any XML transmission or storage can benefit from *compression*, often shrinking the data volume by factors up to 100. I doubt that the savings of EXI are sufficiently large compared to a well compressed XML stream that they compensate for the drawbacks of yet another new non-readable format. A well chosen compression method is a lot better suited to such applications and is already supported by most available XML parsers (or rather outside of the parsers themselves, which is a huge advantage). > Also, why would Java make sense and Python not? Because pretty much all XML technologies come from the Java environment? That doesn't mean that Java is a suitable language for working with them. It only means that it supports them because Java is used for developing them (often as a reference implementation). Stefan _______________________________________________ XML-SIG maillist - XML-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-sig
