The latest addition to our Maven Repository is Japex. Earlier additions include: Fast Infoset and XML Stream Buffer, JSFs, JavaMail and Activation, JAXB, JAX-WS and SAAJ.

Paul reports that Liquid Technologies now has support for the Fast Infoset Standard in their Liquid XML product. Liquid XML implementation is separate from that in the FI project which is used in the WS Stack at GlassFish. Additional information on FI in this Introduction and in many TA Entries.

I'm looking forward to starting to do interop testing of the different FI implementations. Our implementation enables FI on SJS AS and Tomcat (details) and of course FI is part of SJS AS 9.0 (GlassFish). We will keep you posted as more implementations are made public.

Last week, Paul described the fundamentals used for a Practical Generation of an External Vocabulary that can be used in faster Web Services based on Fast Infoset. In a follow-up blog, Paul shows the Java API calls needed to generate the vocabulary, and also what is necessary to configure the endpoints to take advantage of that encoding. Ideally the description of the external vocabulary would be found automatically, but this is not yet standarized.

Details in Paul's Blog. Note - In a separate conversation, Paul indicated that "distribution and source snapshots with FastInfosetUtilities included are available here".

Fast Infoset (Standard, GF project) can use an External Vocabulary for when two parties share vocabulary information. A practical approach to create such a vocabulary is to use XML Schema information, and Paul just created FastInfosetUtilities to do that. The results so far are very Promising.

Also check the discussion in the USER mailing list.

The Fast Infoset (search, standard) implementation from Java.Net is used in several places including the WS stack of JWSDP, SJS AS, and GlassFish. Paul latest blog entry explains how to Enable FastInfoset for JAX-WS 2.0 and JAX-RPC 1.1. All that it is needed is to set a property on the client side stub, and then, thanks to the magic of HTTP agent-driven negotiation, "magic happens" (tm). Check Paul's blog for the details, and enjoy a faster Web Service call!

This is one of a series of blogs where I will try to highlight participation in several communities in GlassFish, specially non-Sun participation; perhaps some of these blogs will interest you as a user, or as a direct contributor.

The Fast Infoset project (some blogs [1] and [2], and white papers [3] and [4]) had wide industry participation in the standard. A number of people participated in the implementation including Alan, Ias, Don and the mailing lists for FI are active, both the DEV list and USERS list, with contributions from additional people like Tatu Saloranta (WoodStox) Jimmy Zhang (XimpleWare), Brian Potarelli (Inversoft) and Mark Swanson mark@ScheduleWorld.com. Ias has incorporated FI into FIME and I know he was also considering adding it into other places, including Mirae @ ASF, and zell@zell.best.vwh.ne reported work on integrating FI with XMLBeans. FI uses Japex which will be used as the testing framework in the EXI group, where Paul and Santiago continue to contribute.

Two words on the image of this blog. I've always liked Castells in part because they are build by a large group and everybody has a role, from very strong people at the bottom to very light boys - and girls - at the top. Even the crowd helps stabilize the castle. A great image for community building, which is why I used them when I was the lead for the JSP specs.

The FastInfoset project is part of GlassFish and provides an implementation of ITU-T Rec. X.891 | ISO/IEC 24824-1 (yep, a double standard spec!). It is a good implementation and comes with both StAX and SAX bindings, supports embedded binary data, and it has been used in other projects like in XJ3D to manipulate X3D and VRML documents.

Paul recently wrote about how nice it is to solve a customer problem:

The performance was pretty horrible though and I was *just* about to write a binary encoded XML mechanism when I came across your Fast Infoset stuff - which did *exactly* what I needed and saved a whole bunch of development and testing. It worked first time too!

In a related blog, Paul also explains the difference between Fast WebServices and Fast InfoSet. You may also want to check the Binary XML Forum and the USERS mailing list for FI.