Evaluating the size of the SOAP for integration in B2B

Abstract

Web Services have become an important means of integration in an organisation and in business to business practices. Of particular interest is the large volumes of structured information that can result from a backup of data in a system, as part of a search requested on the stored data or from some other data exchange requirement. To be a viable in these areas the simple object acceptable proctorial (SOAP) message used must be able to move the data in a secure and fault tolerant manner, but be able to do it in a fast and efficient manner. One of the largest problems in efficiency of using SOAP messages is in the large amount of information describing the structure and content of the message. This paper presents an examination of the size of SOAP document's used in data exchanges when compressed, which also compares the text based document, a comma separated value (CSV) file, containing the same information. Our results suggest significant size cost savings can be made when the SOAP message is compressed. Therefore, the SOAP message contains sufficient data entries this size cost saving makes to total size of the message comparable to the compressed CSV file. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.