There is the obvious question on why FastInfoset and – more importantly for me at this time – why on Indigo (WCF)?
A lot of customers – particularly in the financial industry – have expressed their concern about XML and its ‘bloatiness’: it is simply to verbose to be useful in 10M, 100M or even Gigabyte sized transactions. This makes a lot of sense and thus, FastInfoset (and similar efficent XML initiatives) were born out of this need.
Sun has been behind FastInfoset from its inception and the current JWSDP and the Glassfish application server fully support FI. It has been a clearly stated goal that we see FI as our strategic binary Infoset representation scheme and we would like to achieve ubiquity.
To achieve such ubiquity, it is mandatory to cover as much server and client platforms as possible. With FI being available for the Java platform – supported and open source – this goal is actually achievable. But in order to be truely successful, it is also necessary to enable non-Java platforms to exchange messages in FI. FIFI aims at just that: to enable FI processing for .NET 2.0 and FI message exchange for WCF.
Reminder: the FIFI BOF at JavaONE is tomorrow, May 17, at 9:30pm in Hall E.