Where Are the Holes?

Web services are a broad architectural technology that is built on other point technologies such as SOAP. In turn, SOAP is based on XML and HTTP, and uses networks (including the Internet) for communications. In order to understand quality of service for Web services, we must first understand the inherent limitations and bottlenecks of the underlying technologies and transport systems. Once we have a full grasp of these holes, we will be in a position to craft a Web services architecture that supports QoS.

XML

SOAP messages are encoded in XML. Various aspects of Web services QoS are affected by XML because:

  • XML representations of data result in significantly larger documents than their binary counterparts.

  • Instantiating an ...

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