Some wild thoughts about a Attachment Mediator

[Rajith Attapattu]

Hi All,

Several attendees at CSS mentioned that currently they are using Axis and the attachments sucks as it's base 64.
When I talked about MTOM with axis2 they seem very eager to use this technology.
One person in particular mentioned that they have huge legal docs flying back and forth as attachments and it's a real pain point.

Migrating to Axis2 also seems to be a problem for them as they  have to get agreement from all parties involved.

So how about we route the message through synapse (sitting inside the local network) taking in a base64 encoded message and extrating it and doing MTOM and then send it over the public domain and in the client side we have another Synapse instance inside the firewall which takes the message and do the crappy base 64 encoding and forward it to the client application.
We could have this as an optional mediator that doesn't get bundled with the standard distribution.

So the question is where do we gain? espcially bocs now we are doing encoding/decoding 2 times.

a) The biggest gain is that we are sending smaller messages over the WAN. Which could mean faster dilivery.

b) Allows for a smooth migration stratergy while still gaining some advantage from the above point. For example they can change the service to axis2 and have synapse mediators on clients.
    Then change the clients to axis2 one by one without really disrupt their existing model.

Disadvantage
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a) We still have the base 64 encoded messages flying around our LAN.
b) encoding/decoding happens twice.

Smooth, low risk and a managed migration stratergy is a powerfull solution on it's own.

Regards,

Rajith