Web Services Strategies
Beyond the technology, IT strategies for implementation of Web services by Doug Kaye.
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Loosely Coupled: The Webinar. On 4/30/03 I'm doing an online seminar with John McDowall of Grand Central Networks. The title is "Loosely Coupled: Interoperability for Business Agility."
Posted Thursday, April 10, 2003 10:09:52 PM 
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Amazon Has Loosely Coupled. The good news is that Amazon.com is selling Loosely Coupled for 30% off. The bad news (for the moment) is that they're quoting 3-5 week delivery. That should become "Usually ships in 24 hours" as soon as their inventory arrives. Barnes and Noble offers 20% off and shipping in 2-3 days, or you can order direct from RDS Press, and we'll ship within 24 hours.
Posted Thursday, April 10, 2003 6:41:01 AM
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Evaluating SOAP. I recently linked to an article in Australian IT about a study comparing the performance of SOAP to CORBA. I received a message from Chris Kohlhoff, one of the study's authors, suggesting that the Australian IT coverage might have been less than complete. On Chris' advice, I downloaded the orignal study's PDF.
Indeed, the study by Chris and Robert Steele only coincidentally addresses CORBA. Rather, it compares SOAP, FIX (a text-based protocol for capital markets), and CDR (a binary-format protocol). Among their conclusions:
- The text-based nature of XML is not sufficient to explain SOAP's inefficiency.
- Improvements in the efficiency of SOAP encoders and decoders may enable its use in high performance business applications.
- The cost of converting numerical data from test to binary, identified as major by other studies, does not have a predominant role. [They noted that financial applications--unlike scientific computing--typically don't use floating-point data.]
Unfortunately, when evaluating round-trip latency, it appears that Kohlhoff and Steele only used local (LAN) connections of 10mbps and 100mbps in which the underlying latency of the link is insignificant. I'd like to see the results of similar tests using long-haul multi-hop TCP/IP links of 1,000 miles or more in which the latency of the network itself can have a greater impact than the overhead of the protocols.
Posted Thursday, April 10, 2003 6:06:14 AM
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