EXI Run-Time Library Functions

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This release of XBinder contains a run-time library with functions that can be used to convert XML to and from Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format as described in the W3C draft recommendation at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-exi-20070716/. EXI is described in the working draft as "a very compact representation for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Information Set that is intended to simultaneously optimize performance and the utilization of computational resources".

The EXI implementation in this release contains only the schemaless variant of the encoding as described in the working draft. There is also schema-informed variant and a special compression algorithm that can provide even further gains in compactness and processing efficiency. These may be implemented in later XBinder releases.

Furthermore, the draft document discusses an optional header that can be added to an EXI document to communicate encoding options that were used for the encoding. This header uses still not implemented technologies and is thus omitted from this EXI version. An EXI encoding produced by these library function will consist of a body only; therefore, the sender and receiver must agree on the options used in an out-of-band way. If both sender and receiver use the XBinder run-time to communicate, the default options will be used and no special communications will be necessary.