Ready to propose EXI incubator candidate

[Stephen Williams <sd...@lig.net>]

This is a call for a champion and mentors for an incubator project we are about to propose formally for implementations of the 
W3C EXI specification and related technologies.  The current proposal abstract, proposal, and background for EXI can be found at 
the end of this message for reference[4].

Some current and former members of the W3C EXI [1] / XBC [2] working groups are interested in submitting an Apache Incubator 
proposal for EXI.  Open EXI is an existing open-source project with a partial EXI implementation under the Apache 2.0 license.  
Another more-complete commercially-developed implementation is being released soon, also under the Apache 2.0 license.  Further 
contributions will be made soon.

We have a proposal, to be released shortly, that seems complete with an initial set of five committers.  We believe we now need 
a champion and nominated mentors.  I have agreed to lead this effort and would be happy to act as a mentor if promoted to that 
status.

[1] W3C Efficient XML Interchange http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/
[2] XML Binary Characterization http://www.w3.org/XML/Binary/
[3] http://sdw.st/gres

[4] Current Open-EXI Apache Incubator Proposal introduction to EXI:

Abstract

Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) is a forthcoming W3C Recommendation for compression and high performance decompression of XML. This standard has wide applicability to all forms of XML documents and consistently beats zip/gzip in terms of compactness. Multiple software implementations are beginning to emerge. This work will establish a high performance open source codebase in both Java and C++ that can immediately be used in bandwidth-limited environments and other software applications that are not currently well served by XML. It may later may integrated into http servers and clients.

Proposal

This proposal seeks to create a project within the Apache Software Foundation to develop an implementation of the current EXI Candidate Recommendation, and to track changes to the Candidate Recommendation as is progresses to an approved W3C standard. The initial implementation will be in Java, and a subsequent C++ implementation will follow. Once implemented the EXI standard could be used in many other Apache projects, such as the web server, web services, etc.

The EXI specification is available at the EXI Working Group Public Page. A Primer on EXI is available there, as are an evaluation of the likely impacts and best practices. An evaluation and measurement note are available; these notes are a product of the test framework results.

Background

Since the inception of XML, it has been noticed that a good number of data exchange application scenarios seemed to fit the use of XML very appealing, only to find XML inhibitive given its sometimes very costly inefficiency of inherent verbosity. Legacy applications involving data exchange, for example, typically use non-XML data formats (e.g. ASN.1 PER) that predate XML, are often far more efficient and in some cases hand-optimized to achieve the best performance result. When such applications attempt to harness the numerous benefits of XML, it is not unusual that they find XML helplessly bulky to adopt given the bandwidth constraints of the existing communication infrastructures that were designed with the currently used format in mind. Another example is a data-intensive mobile application for which bandwidth is at a premium and the use of XML is not very realistic due to its substantive disadvantage at bandwidth conservation. While there are some other use cases that address the bloated message size issue with general-purpose compression methods such as GZip, the application of such methods unfortunately more often than not compound the efficiency issue for those use cases aforementioned because GZip usually degrades the processing efficiency dramatically and has little or no impact on the message size when individual message is short.

Over the years, there have been developed numerous file formats purported to serve as alternative, efficient representation of XML data. W3C's (World Wide Web Consortium) XBC WG (XML Binary Characterization Working Group) in 2005 found that most, if not all of those formats are not very general in the sense that they had been each designed to target a particular problem domain and do not serve well use cases of other domains. In 2006, W3C launched the EXI (Efficient XML Interchange) WG with the charter to conduct study and formulate a single alternative format that provides utmost efficiency better than the customarily used formats (e.g. ASN.1 and GZip) do and even competes with hand-optimized formats, with broadest coverage of use cases and platforms including those that had not been well served by XML, and yet is compatible with XML and integrates well with existing XML family of standards and applications without major disruption.

As of this writing, EXI is a W3C Candidate Recommendation, and is well on its way towards becoming the W3C Recommendation around mid-2010. The status of Candidate Recommendation indicates that W3C calls for implementations of the specification in order to foster interoperability between various implementations before the technology becomes a W3C Recommendation.


Thanks,
Stephen
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Re: Ready to propose EXI incubator candidate

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@apache.org>]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 8:05 AM, David Crossley <cr...@apache.org> wrote:
> ...People will correct me if i am wrong, but i reckon that you can
> commence your "Proposal" phase now, and gather those participants
> as you go. Will need that sorted before the "Vote" phase....

That's correct, it's fine to create a proposal at
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator before champion and mentors are
available, and [DISCUSS] it here indicating that the podling is
looking for those people.

As David said, incubation mentors and champion have to be Incubator
PMC members, see
http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Roles_and_Responsibilities.html

-Bertrand

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Re: Ready to propose EXI incubator candidate

[David Crossley <cr...@apache.org>]

Stephen Williams wrote:
> 
> We have a proposal, to be released shortly, that seems complete with an 
> initial set of five committers.  We believe we now need a champion and 
> nominated mentors.  I have agreed to lead this effort and would be happy to 
> act as a mentor if promoted to that status.

The "Mentors" are ASF Members, who understand how the ASF operates
and can guide the new project. See the "Who" link at top-left.

I cannot help in these roles (already over-volunteered).

People will correct me if i am wrong, but i reckon that you can
commence your "Proposal" phase now, and gather those participants
as you go. Will need that sorted before the "Vote" phase.

It might also be useful to contact some of the various "XML-related"
projects at Apache via their "dev" mail lists to alert them to the
proposal and to encourage interest and perhaps attract someone
as a champion.
http://projects.apache.org/indexes/category.html#xml

-David

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