Web Service versus Distributed Objects: A Case Study of Performance and Interface Design

E-ISSN： 1546-5004|4|3|49-64

ISSN： 1545-7362

Source： International Journal of Web Services Research (IJWSR), Vol.4, Iss.3, 2007-07, pp. : 49-64

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Abstract

Web services are promoted as a new model for distributed systems, yet many skeptics see them as simply a poor implementation of traditional remote procedure calls (RPC) or distributed objects. Previous comparisons, which show Web services to be significantly slower than RPC, are biased because they use a RPC communication style and ignore the document-oriented style that is recommended for Web services. We compare the straightforward design and implementation of a small file server application implemented using proxy-based RMI and document-oriented Web services. We show that Web services outperform RMI when accessing multiple/deeply nested files, especially over high-latency networks. However, the automatically generated Web service interfaces are awkward to use, so we develop a technique for wrapping the Web service to make it as easy to use as the distributed object implementation. This case study provides a more detailed comparison of the relationship between Web services and distributed objects.