The definition and translation of metadata is incorporated in all systems that exchange structured data. We observe that the manipulation of this metadata can be decomposed into three separate steps: discovery, binding of program objects to the metadata, and marshaling of data to and from wire formats. We have designed a method of representing message formats in XML, using data types that are available in the XML schema specification. We have implemented a tool called xml2wire that uses such metadata and exploits this decomposition in order to provide flexible metadata definition facilities for an efficient binary communications mechanism. We also observe that the use of xml2wire makes possible such flexibility without intolerable performance effects.
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