Performance & Implementation Best Practices for Information Passing Through Web Services

Abstract: Data interchange between different web applications and web-services becomes more and more common. Not only to send or receive data from another service or application but also to reuse modules and webservice functionality from one application to another. There are many standards and protocols available today to use when building web-services. This research will only focus on three of them which all represent some of the most common implementations when building web-services of today. These are XML-RPC, SOAP and REST. They have differences between each other but can perform the same tasks for a web-service. They are examined through performance and implementation issues, benchmarking as well as interviews. The result reveals performance issues for XML-RPC as well as how complex SOAP can be for inexperienced users. In addition it also reveals why REST is gaining popularity recently.