Abstract:
Web services. with an emphasis on open standards and flexibility.
may provide benefits over existing capital markets integration
practices. However, web services must first meet certain technical
requirements including performance, security and fault-tolerance.
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of SOAP performance
using realistic business application message content. To get
some indication of whether SOAP is appropriate for high performance
capital markets systems, the results are compared with a
widely used existing protocol. The study finds that, although SOAP
performs relatively poorly, the difference is less than in scientific
computing environments. Furthermore, we find that in realistic
business applications it is possible for text-based wire formats to
have comparable performance to binary, and that the text-based nature
of XML is not sufficient to explain SOAP's inefficiency. This
suggests that further work may enable SOAP 10 become a viable
wire format for high performance business applications.
