Optimising web services performance with table driven XML

The performance of the SOAP protocol has often been regarded relatively poor and requiring undue amounts of processor time, storage and bandwidth due to its use of text-based, metadata-laden XML encoding. There are many proposals available to tackle this perceived problem, however none of these coherently consider the different aspects of the problem: (1) message size; (2) message structure; (3) accessing individual elements; and (4) interoperability with other Web Services protocols. The technique proposed in this paper: Table Driven XML (TDXML) takes such a coherent view and offers more compact messages, simpler message structure and easier access to individual elements when compared to conventional SOAP. TDXML also enables keyed access to individual elements to enable single pass message parsing for improved object serialisation and deserialisation. Experimental studies show that TDXML can be incorporated easily into a commercially available SOAP implementation with 30% improved latency performance. Furthermore, this paper reports that TDXML can also be implemented with other transport mechanisms and provide even better performance (over 100%) than SOAP in regard to network bandwidth and latency.