A Review of SOAP Performance Optimization Techniques to Improve Communication in Web Services in Loosely Coupled

Web services (WS) implements Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). WS extends World Wide Web (WWW) infrastructure. This provides a means of integrating software applications in loosely coupled distributed systems. WS communication is facilitated by Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP offers a simple and lightweight mechanism for exchanging structured and typed information among peers in a decentralized, distributed computing environment. However, SOAP’s transmitted data is represented in XML. XML documents are huge in size and verbose (highly redundant), and processing of XML information and its conversion to and fro memory data types are some of the major hindrance in performance for high performance applications. This survey paper gives an insight of previous researchers’ contributions on techniques used in optimizing SOAP in communication in WS in terms of bandwidth utilization and throughput. To optimize SOAP, several techniques covered include: client side caching, differential serialization, SOAP binding, compression, server side caching, and differential deserialization.