Enhancing Performance of Web Services in Mobile Applications by SOAP Compression
Ivan Ivanovski, Saso Gramatikov, Dimitar Trajanov · 2008
since being proposed in May 2000, the SOAP Internet protocol has by now revolutionized application development by connecting graphic user interface desktop applications to powerful Internet servers using the standards of the internet: HTTP and XML. However the fact that it uses a text-based XML encoding unlike the traditional binary protocols, results in higher bandwidth consumption, bigger storage requirement and increased processing overhead. When using mobile devices, one additional question about the battery performance raises. This paper presents the results of implementing efficient compression and its positive impact to the overall performance of the mobile devices that use wireless communication with web services, in terms of significantly reduced bandwidth, quite improved response time, and extended battery life of the mobile devices. HE DEVELOPMENT of wireless networks brought a new impulse to the portable devices as well. The new possibilities in the field of portability envisioned a new way in design and implementation of wireless communication protocols between mobile devices and one central system. Ever since, the transportation of data acquired from and sent to these devices has been challenging in aspects of security, stability, performance, response time, battery life, etc. In this paper an accent is put over the optimization of usage of web services through wireless medium by compressing the soap messages that travel through the network. In general the web services allow the applications to use them as black boxes, passing some parameters to them and expecting results without any need for knowing what the web service actually does inside its code. The application knows which parameters to send and what results to expect, and this knowledge comes from the web reference within the application itself - a proxy created according to the web service description language file which is part of the web service itself. The self describing