> Now it may be worth moving away from the through of XML as angled brackets, > etc and think in terms of its abstracted model - the Infoset. Because XML is > a model is a very powerful and extensible way of expressing information - if > only that damn wire format were smaller. I agree that there are issues with > passing large blocks of XML over the wire and that the binary rep is almost > certainly smaller. This doesn't mean that this will always be the case (well > actually it will always be the case to a degree - a tuned binary rep will be > smaller than a binary rep with structural info in it too - just not by > loads).
A couple of thoughts on this. As part of the issue is a comparison to COM+, where cross process communication on the same processor is an issue, what I remember of the direction Indigo was headed was to help eliminate some of the string overhead when sending messages through known connections. So within a process for certain and as I recall, between processes on the same machine this issue is being addressed by a faster message passing scheme than xml, transparently to the message senders. Can anybody confirm? I think if you compare web service techniques across processors to DCOM, on the whole it fares pretty well, particularly when all the transaction semantics get ironed out. Are there really that many use cases that message size would be a major factor? I spent a lot of time a few years back trying to help optimize JDOM. Some interesting things came out of that. The xml serialization that JDOM did was not appreciably slower than the native binary serialization. As strange as that was, we found it was possible to write a customized xml based serialization that effectivly serialized the object graphs but not necesarily the equivalent xml, and was much faster than the xml serialization or binary serialization. This binary serialization is of course the basis of java rmi, and is part of the problem list that has made some pretty clever people rethink the value of strongly typed distributed programming in general and ejb in particular. =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentorŪ http://www.develop.com Some .NET courses you may be interested in: NEW! Guerrilla ASP.NET, 26 Jan 2004, in Los Angeles http://www.develop.com/courses/gaspdotnetls View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
