A hybrid architecture to improve SOAP performance in web services communication

Abstract

A web service is an implementation of service-oriented architecture which extends World Wide Web infrastructure thus providing means of integrating software applications in loosely coupled distributed systems. It provides an abstract interface in which applications access services via ubiquitous web protocols and data formats such as HTTP, XML and SOAP. Web services communication is aided by Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP provides a simple and lightweight mechanism for exchanging structured and typed information between peers in a decentralized, distributed computing environment using XML. SOAP beats its competitors like CORBA and Java RMI due to its simplicity, flexibility, robustness, extensibility and inter- operability in heterogeneous systems. However, SOAP transmits its data represented in XML. XML documents are huge in size and verbose thus becoming a major hindrance in performance for high performance applications that process lots of data. This research improves the performance of XML-based messaging technique in SOAP communication model of applications implemented in web services. To improve SOAP performance, a combination of techniques was integrated which include: client-side caching, simple server-side database queries, compression technique and document-literal style description of WSDL. A relatively high turn-around time and lower network throughput is recorded. Nevertheless, performance of SOAP is improved in terms of bandwidth utilization and transfer time while running SOAP web service applications. This can be useful in disadvantaged networks (10mbps) and subsequently save costs in communication