Xml and Fast Web Service
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea
The Performance Problem of the Xml Web Service
XML-based messaging is at the core of the current Web Service technology. XML has significant advantages but bandwidth and performance suffer because of the size of the messages being transmitted.
XML-based messages are much larger and require more processing than any of the other existing protocols. This increased bandwidth affects both wired and wireless network services. These larger messages increase the possibility of having to retransmit because of the corruption that can occur when in the air.
What is Fast Web Service?
Fast Web Service attempts to solve these transmission problems by defining binary-based messages that consume much less bandwidth. The Fast Web Service is faster and requires less system memory to process the messages. Fast Web Service is not intended to replace XML-based messaging. It is an alternative selection for your company when bandwidth performance is an issue such as Web TV and Instant Phone Messaging.
Fast Web Service must define the inter-operability presented between Fast peers and with existing Web Service that does not support Fast.
Fast Web Service is platform-independent. This expands the inter-operability to non-Java platforms of service allowing greater application usage.
Fast can ensure that small devices may efficiently be used as Web Service clients, that bandwidth usage is significantly reduced, and that servers process messages efficiently.
Standards and Technology of Fast Web Service
Fast has a goal to minimize the impact to existing specifications and thus minimize the effect on Web Service developers and tools vendors. Fast is targeted at developers of Web Service rather than the end users.
Fast is built on the foundation of well-proven network standards and technologies that ensure that no changes are required to WSDL.
Conclusion of Fast Web Service
The concept of Fast Web Service is a viable alternative to the usual XML technique that has previously been used. Fast web service is designed to maximize the performance of the Web Service in a variety of domains. It minimizes the impact on developers and ensures inter-operability between the variety of platforms. The performance gains from Fast Web Service are substantial although its applicability is not used universally. There are some issues involved that are due to its loss of self-description that are not present when XML encoding is being used.
Performance results that are obtained from the Java prototype provide some compelling evidence that it is possible for a Web Service implementation to perform at speeds close to that of their binary equivalents. These are RMI and RMI/IIOP. If performance is an issue for your organization, then Fast Web service may be the answer to your problem.
Sun Microsystems is participating in the development and standardization of this project to ensure that Fast Web Service is standardized. The majority of the standardization process is complete. The encoding rules are a significant proportion of work that has been completed. There are finishing touches that are needed before this can be acknowledged as a well proven technology and be applied to the current Web Service implementation.
