I have written a custom server using Mina which handles XML requests from clients, and sends XML responses. Version 1.0 of the server has a very primitive (i.e. non-existent) protocol i.e. it expects a raw xml message with no http headers etc. Since the server does not know the length of the message up front, it must check the data as it comes in to ensure it gets a complete xml document. As the load on the server increases, I suspect that this will cause us performance problems.
Put this down to inexperience on my behalf when it comes to writing servers from scratch. I'm now looking for a good protocol to use to handle requests, and XML-RPC looks a likely candidate. I want to investigate how difficult it will prove to take our existing server and re-engineer it to use XML-RPC. Does anyone on this mailing list have any hints or tips as to how I could go about doing this? Could I use the Apache XML-RPC library to re-engineer the server, for example? Any hints, tips, words of advice or warning greatly appreciated. Thanks and regards, Neill [Some additional background on the server. It works in 2 modes - a request / response mode, and also a notification mode whereby a client can subscribe to listen for events in the system. In the notification mode the client keeps a connection to the server open. The server writes to this connection whenever it has information that will interest the client.]
