Distributed computing using SOAP. What about speed ?

[Skip Montanaro]

    Tim> The short reason for this is that connection-oriented solutions
    Tim> like RPCs create very "brittle" applications in highly distributed,
    Tim> high-performance environments.  I am thus less than enthusiastic
    Tim> about SOAP as a solution.

I'd suggest that most of the applications that use SOAP or XML-RPC are not
"applications in highly distributed, high-performance environments".  Highly
distributed, yes, if you're talking about over the Internet.  Most uses I'm
aware of, however, are not meant to be high-performance the way you mean it.

I have a server that uses XML-RPC to service requests.  Fairly high-level
requests are made to it for information from a MySQL database.  For every
request to the XML-RPC server, it may make tens to hundreds of requests to
the MySQL database.  The machine-independence, language-independence, and
ease of extension of the server far outweigh its performance shortfalls.

While SOAP and XML-RPC are definitely not the bees knees for extremely
high-performance applications, they definitely seem to be filling a niche
for many people.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com)
http://www.mojam.com/
http://www.musi-cal.com/