<<For years those building SOAs have said that "SOAP is too slow" and
Web Services are just the icing on the SOAP cake. However, as somebody
who's out there in the SOA project world right now I think it's fair
to say that many SOAs are indeed slow, and that performance is always
an issue when dealing with Web services.
However, SOAP could be speeding up. Enter WS-MTOM, or the development
of the SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism specification.
MTOM offers composability of base64 with the transport efficiency of
SOAP with attachments. However, WS-MTOM wasn't tied into the rest of
the Web Services architecture: there was no standard way for services
to advertise that they were "MTOM ready," until now.
IBM and Microsoft have recently submitted WS-MTOMPolicy to W3C. This
has now been acknowledged by W3C, which clears the way for a
standardization effort around this issue.
>From the spec:
"This specification describes a domain-specific policy assertion
that indicates endpoint support of the optimized MIME multipart/
related serialization of SOAP messages defined in section 3 of the
SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism specification. This
policy assertion can be specified within a policy alternative as
defined in WS-Policy Framework and attached to a WSDL description as
defined in WS-PolicyAttachment."
So, take WS-Policy and MTOM, and it's soon going to be possible for
Web Services across enterprise boundaries to advertise their MTOM
capabilities. Thus, SOAP will be faster. Thus, Web services will be
faster. Thus, our SOAs will be faster. That's a good thing.>>
You can read this at:
<http://weblog.infoworld.com/realworldsoa/archives/2007/01/speed_up_your_s.html?source=NLC-SOA2007-01-18>
Gervas
