RE: Article: Fat protocols slow Web services

> The most recent rise of XML-based RPC web services is worrisome then
from
> a number of standpoints. SOAP messages ARE big. The current efforts by
a
> number of vendors are typically expanding the relevant bytes being
sent by
> a  factor of ten, you're adding the overhead of security and type
> encoding/decoding, and they are making this technology transparent -
drag
> and drop the requisite Bean or COM control on your form, and you can
start
> writing synchronous RPCs without even knowing that you're doing it.
This
> means that there will be a lot of very badly written web services
that, by
> themselves, work fine, but overall contribute to the degradation of
the
> networks.

Take "XML" out of this, and everything you say is still true.
Synchronous RPC over a WAN is rough, no matter how it is encoded.  I
don't see any evidence at all that the RPC people wrap with XML is worse
than the crazy things people do with RMI and DCOM.

All of the issues you mention are important for *any* synchronous RPC
system.  Encoding is one of the least important issues in most cases, so
if you are implying that finding a less "fat" encoding will solve the
problems you mention, you are misleading people. 

Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2002 18:57:07 UTC