It usually takes times for new ideas and technologies to be adopted by the industry. However, Fast Infoset (FI), a binary encoding for the XML infoset, is growing very quickly. A good example of this is a recently founded company, Inversoft, which has developed an XML-based protocol and is using FI as a space/time efficient encoding.

Their protocol is called Internet Application Protocol or IAP and you can find its specification here. IAP is essentially a replacement for HTTP which uses XML (and XML schema) to bridge the name-value pair limitation in HTTP.

While researching binary XML encodings, an effort that ultimately resulted in the standardization of Fast Infoset, we learned that a large number of organizations have developed their own, proprietary messaging system. Those same organizations have investigated a possible migration to XML and XML schemas only to find the resulting system impractical due to the size of the messages and the number of CPU cycles needed to process them (this is what I referred earlier as space/time efficiency; and before you ask the question, no, GZIP or redundancy-based compression does not solve this problem, it only addresses the size efficiency and it does so by negatively affecting the time efficiency!).

Fast Infoset supports a number of advanced features such as encoding algorithms (to avoid the expensive text to binary conversions), restricted alphabets, external vocabularies, etc. Best of all, there is a fully featured, production ready and open source implementation at Java.net. Moreover, FI is also part of JWSDP 1.6 and is fully integrated into JAX-RPC, so you can use it for Web services as well.

You can find more information about Fast Infoset here; another good source for new ideas and updates is Paul Sandoz' blog.