This document evaluates the Xebu format with respect to the XML Binary Characterization Properties identified by the XML Binary Characterization Working Group. The basic format and the schema optimizations are evaluated separately. Some properties are accompanied by notes clarifying aspects of the evaluation or details of the property measurement.
| Property | Xebu | Xebu-S | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| MUST support | |||
| Directly Readable and Writable | Yes | Yes | The current Xebu implementation has support for standard XML parsing and serialization APIs, including SAX and DOM. |
| Transport Independence | Yes | Yes | |
| Compactness | No | No | Xebu itself does not include any document optimizations. Both formats satisfy Compactness for the Neither class, and Xebu-S can achieve Compactness for the Schema class for some types of schemas. Compressing Xebu with gzip appears to consistently produce slightly larger documents than compressing the equivalent XML with gzip. |
| Human Language Neutral | Yes | Yes | |
| Platform Neutrality | Yes | Yes | The encoding of xsd:dateTime values has been optimized for the Java platform. However, this representation (or a very similar one) is used widely. |
| Integratable into XML Stack | Yes | Yes | The data model of Xebu is intentionally designed to be compatible at a very low level with XML to enable this property. |
| Royalty Free | Yes | Yes | The Xebu implementation is available under the Open Source MIT license and its designers have no patent interests in the format. |
| Fragmentable | Yes | Yes | The automata of Xebu-S may also be applied to fragments. It is also possible with advance preparation to handle self-contained subtrees, but the current Xebu implementation does not support this. |
| Streamable | Yes | Yes | |
| Roundtrip Support | Yes | Yes | The equivalence is Lossless in all cases. |
| Generality | No | No | The measurement is 7 for Xebu, 11 for Xebu-S |
| Schema Extensions and Deviations | Yes | Yes | Xebu-S satisfies this property to some degree. It does not support arbitrary extensions, but it does not possess any of the disqualifying features of the property description. |
| Format Version Identifier | No | No | Satisfying this property is a simple matter, but as Xebu is not yet in widespread use, it has been put aside for now. |
| Content Type Management | Yes | Yes | Currently Xebu is used with a media type. Use of a schema is seen as an external consideration to the format, and therefore both Xebu and Xebu-S use the same media type. |
| Self Contained | Yes | No | Xebu-S requires also the specification of the automata and any pre-tokenization to understand encoded documents. |
| MUST NOT Prevent | |||
| Processing Efficiency | Does Not Prevent | Does Not Prevent | On its main platform, mobile phones, the Xebu implementation is several times faster than common XML implementations in realistic scenarios. |
| Small Footprint | Does Not Prevent | Does Not Prevent | Xebu has been designed for use on mobile devices, and the current Xebu implementation in Java has a JAR size of 30 kilobytes. |
| Widespread Adoption | Does Not Prevent | Does Not Prevent | |
| Space Efficiency | Does Not Prevent | Does Not Prevent | Xebu intentionally bounds the sizes of its internal tables to provide this property, and is capable of processing arbitrarily large XML documents in constant space. |
| Implementation Cost | Does Not Prevent | Does Not Prevent | Apart from the schema-to-automata mapping, the Xebu format is extremely simple to implement. |
| Forward Compatibility | Does Not Prevent | Does Not Prevent |