Last week I rediscovered some work done by Pankaj Kumar and others at HP on using Cocoon as a Framework for Web Services. The software for this framework (the Cocoon logicsheets for SOAP etc.) wasn't available on the website, but it would be interesting to compare it's performance with conventional Web service implementations.
One of the performance bottlenecks in Web services (see my previous post on Web service performance), is the cost of Java to XML and back to Java conversion- especially if you have a large, complex payload. Using something like Cocoon that can deal with XML natively (using XSL) should, in theory at least, be a better alternative. Especially if it is used as a SOAP intermediary that is not interested in the entire payload, but only parts of it, like a header or specific elements in the body, and doesn't want to serialize XML to a Java object to get at it.
[Update] I looked on the Cocoon website, and they have this interesting use of Cocoon for Portal Syndication using Web Services.
Posted by vivek at May 23, 2004 10:25 AM | TrackBack