ASN.1 has many other advantages :
- ASN.1 has the capital advantage to offer extensibility which gives the solution to solve the nightmare of upgrading step by step communicating applications in a network. This mechanism allows one application which has not migrated to the last version of a specification to communicate with an application working with this last version (and vice-versa) and so without modifying the applications code.
- ASN.1 is supported by tools that translates the ASN.1 specification in the programming language chosen for the development of your application. They allows to significantly save time in the development and the validation of your application and so reduce the time-to-market.
- ASN.1 is largely used in the field since its first publication as an international standard in 1984 ( see next slides on application domains). Its encoding rules have proven their reliability and ensure interoperability.
- ASN.1 is constantly evolving in order to take into account new application requirements. For instance, new features such as Encoding Control Notation (ECN) or XML Encoding rules (XER) are due to be published as ASN.1 international standard in 2002.
Initially created for the global needs of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) environment, ASN.1 has imposed its numerous advantages in many other application domains.
