Using SOAP with Attachments for e-Science

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the performance of standard SOAP compared with SOAP with Attachments (SwA) in communicating floating-point matrices of different sizes. Several key factors, including response time, size of SOAP message, and XML parsing time are addressed. In addition, these performance-related factors are also compared for two different formats of attachment – MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) and DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation). The objective of this paper is to identify how the use of SwA to deal with complex datatypes and large amounts of data can improve performance by reducing XML parsing. The results show that sending and receiving a SOAP message that carries same data takes much longer using standard SOAP than using SwA. Furthermore, the size of the SOAP message built by standard SOAP is several times larger than when using SwA.