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Web Services Not Always Better

Posted by timothy on from the web-toast dept.

cdthompso1 writes "In a pragmatic article at ZDNet Australia entitled 'Porting to .NET: Style at the sake of speed?' author Tim Landgrave analyzes the pros and cons of rearchitecting a legacy C++ application to .NET using the lastest services-oriented approach. His conclusions may surprise some, particularly if you are contemplating or already in the middle of a .NET migration yourself."

1 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Web services and performance by r4lv3k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have also encountered this type of situation. I had a .NET server communicating with diverse clients, some running NT, some UNIX.

    Web services was not available for all the platforms, and even if it were, it would be too resource intensive for some- DOM is a memory hog! ONC-RPC would work for all but its ugly. CORBA is even uglier IMHO.

    The best solution I found was XML-RPC. The .NET platform has an XML-RPC library that supports remoting -- all I had to do was change a line of code to use the XML-RPC formatter instead of the SOAP formatter!

    On Solaris I could have used the Java libraries for XML, but these clients had better things to do than swap pages for the JVM :). Used xmlrpc-c for all the Unix.

    I was able to get xmlrpc-c to build on even the most braindead platform, but if for some reason I couldn't.. I'd write a quick-n-dirty SAX parser with expat, and reply with canned responses.

    My advice is don't cripple your design with the lowest common middleware solution. Encapsulate the ugliness, and embrace the future, it will be worth it in the long run.

    r4lv3k