Efficient XML Interchange for rich internet applications

The tremendous acceptance of Web applications, or more specifically, rich media applications are about to be extended to embedded devices such as mobile phones, digital picture frames or TV sets. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is one important pillar when we deal with such Internet applications. XML is known as the interchange language of the Web. Besides its outstanding features, in the domain of embedded devices, XML is difficult to handle due to the processing overhead and the verbosity associated with its use. This paper evaluates the efficient access of rich Internet applications especially in the domain of resource limited embedded devices such as digital picture frames. For this purpose, typical XML source information models for rich Internet applications, such as Silverlight and SVG, are evaluated. In this context, the new efficient XML interchange (EXI) format is applied and studied. Finally a generic adaption of the EXI format is developed to even increase the efficiency. The paper concludes with the proposal for further studies on an integration of EXI-based typed interfaces to reduce the processing complexity for rich media applications on embedded devices.