Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative

Xqueeze Project Summary

Motive - The whys behind Xqueeze

The Problem: XML has grown wildly in its popularity as a medium for exchange of structured data and is now increasingly being used in large scale distributed applications and dedicated messaging protocols. However, XML is quite verbose and sub-optimal for such applications, mostly for the sake of human readability.

Compression? Compression of XML documents is widely used to lower bandwidth usage and storage capacity for large documents. This is fine as long as you don't have to deal with XML streams and you don't use it for devices with low computation power. Then again, you might be paying for something you don't need (readability).

Binarization? There is no dearth of proposals for binary representation of XML. Where these fail is in offering the flexibility afforded by XML. How much of a difference would adoption of binary formats make to the style of application development and middleware usage? Can the chosen encoding fit into your scheme of document generation?

Solution - the whats and hows

Objectives:

Minimization of space consumed by markup
Compatibility with XML based design, development and deployment
Fast Parsing
Minimum or no loss of generality afforded by XML

What Xqueeze is not

Xqueeze is not a compression mechanism
Xqueeze does not offer another way to structure data
Xqueeze is not meant for a few particular XML document types
Xqueeze is not inflexible

What Xqueeze is

Xqueeze has an alternate representation of XML -- Xqueeze Markup Language (xqML)
Xqueeze can provide the same DOM/SAX interfaces as XML
Xqueeze can work with any XML specification
xqML is a compact binary representation of XML that need not be re-defined for any document type, yet can be specific for each
xqML is (expectedly; no test data available) faster to parse and generate than XML

Details

You may now like to briefly read about how Xqueeze is different and how it works in principle. Please refer to the Concept page for this. Feature Details page elaborates on the entire project. Technical Specifications and other documentation can be found on the Documentation page.

Initiators

Nitesh Ambastha, Tahir Hashmi

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