/dev/code

I have come to the realization that the thing I was trying to describe in my previous post is fairly close to ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation 1). The thing about ASN.1 that I never really grasped was that you can have different encoding rules. Thus, you can have an encoding that encodes as XML, or another one that has a more efficient binary protocol. I came to this realization while reading about Sun's Fast Infoset for SOAP requests, during my desperate search for a production-ready Java SOAP implementation that was reasonably fast. Still looking, though..