The use of text-based XML encoding in SOAP-based web services results in increases in processing overhead, storage requirements and bandwidth consumption compared to traditional alternative binary protocols. This problem is made worse by the use of Base64 encoding for binary data. There are many proposals available to tackle this perceived problem, however, none of these coherently considers the different aspects of the problem: (1) message size; (2) message structure; (3) accessing individual elements and (4) interoperability with other web services protocols. This paper presents a new technique called Table-Driven XML (TDXML), which offers more compact messages, simpler message structure and easier access to individual elements than conventional SOAP. Experimental studies show that TDXML can be incorporated easily into a commercially available SOAP implementation with 30% improved latency performance. Furthermore, this paper reports that TDXML can also be implemented with other transport mechanisms and provide even better performance (over 100%) than SOAP in regard to network bandwidth and latency.
展开▼
