Re: "Binary XML" proposals

["Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@lig.net>]

Al Snell wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
> 
> > Hmmm. I ran some tests a while ago on JAVA serialization vs.
> > serialization to XML, and binary RPC vs XML-RPC. I found reading
> > and writing the *binary* JAVA serialization to be around 3x slower
> > than writing to XML and reading it back in...
> 
> Yeah, Java serialisation is apparently quite slow as a process, I hear.

I think I have a trick with Java that will work, be efficient, and not
overly distort my design.

> > conversely, I found XML-RPC to be about 3x slower than binary RPC.
> 
> A lot of that might be HTTP overhead :-)
> 
> Three-way handshake before you even send the request, the
> connection teardown? *retch*!

Half-duplex RPC is never going to compete with what really works: async
pipelined message oriented application environments.  SOAP does allow
this technically, but it's unclear if it's usable with HTTP.  Layered
over something like Jabber or BXXP, it makes sense.  That's a different
topic however.

> > At the end of the day, there are *huge* numbers of variables
> > that play a part in performance. One thing I've found is that
> > the performance of the data structures that the XML encodes
> > is a *huge* factor. A naive DOM implementation will take
> > ages to construct, regardless of the speed of parsing.
> 
> One of the things being considered over in xml-bin now is formats with
> indices on, so a DOM implementation can pull stuff from the file as needed
> and no sooner. That's nice for documents that are only used for a couple
> of limited XPath queries.

Exactly.  An N-Tier application environment often needs to simply route,
log, or otherwise work on messages where a full parse is a waste.

> ABS
> 
> --
>                                Alaric B. Snell
>  http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
>    Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software

sdw
-- 
sdw@lig.net  http://sdw.st
Stephen D. Williams
43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 
Dec2000