Evaluating SOAP for high performance applications in capital markets.

Abstract

Web services, with an emphasis on open standards and flexibility, may provide benefits over existing capital markets integration practices.However, web services must first meet certain technical requirements including performance, security and fault-tolerance.This paper presents an experimental evaluation of SOAP performance using realistic business application message content.To get some indication of whether SOAP is appropriate for high performance capital markets systems, the results are compared with a widely used existing protocol.The study finds that, although SOAP performs relatively poorly, the difference is less than in scientific computing environments.Furthermore, we find that in realistic business applications it is possible for text-based wire formats to have comparable performance to binary, and that the