[Mono-list] SOAP - first choice?

[A Rafael D Teixeira]

>From: Frank Rehberger <Frank.Rehberger@web.de>
>
>I know, everybody dislikes those questions.
>I have some experience with agent conversation acts (ACL). Beside the
>fact that it uses Lisp syntax instead of XML, its messages are
>structered similar to those in SOAP.
>One problem was, that parsing those messages takes much more time than
>demarshalling GIOP messages. If two peers do interaction with high
>frequency this sums up  a lot.  Beside XML parsing, primitives are
>encoded as strings and will need additional parsing on higher level.
>
>Q: Do you really believe that SOAP is an RMI middleware of first choice?
>In my opinion, choosing SOAP for transport Microsoft did shoot into its
>own knee.


SOAP is not the first choice for Microsoft, either.

See the prescription:

The important thing is: first one must establish the need for 'Remoting' 
('logically' distributed components/objects).
To enable 'Remoting' one have to design 'serializable' objects.

Secondly one must determine if the objects are going to be 'physically' 
distributed. Most solutions in truth can have the multiple objects (in 
layered or scattered fashion) residing in the same machine, where 'Remoting' 
is just binary in-memory interprocess comunication.

Thirdly the requirements for location/nature of objects select the protocol 
for remoting (done just by changing the XML configuration file):
- For objects residing inside a firewall one should use DCOM for COM 
objects, and TCP Binary Serialization for CLR objects.
- Only for objects 'across' firewalls or limited platforms, itīs recommended 
SOAP.

As Mono will implement the CLR in Linux, probably TCP Binary Serialization 
will be the norm, not SOAP. Even between multiple platforms/implementations.

Rafael Teixeira
Brazilian Developer





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