A primary function of Web services applications is to share data among applications over the Internet. The data shared can vary in format and include large binary files with large binary payloads, such as documents, images, music files, and so on. When large binary files are encoded into XML format for inclusion in SOAP messages, even larger files are produced. When a Web service processes and transmits these large files over the network, the performance of the Web service application and the network are negatively affected. In the worst case scenario the effects are as follows:
One way to deal with this problem is to encode the binary portions of the SOAP messages so as to optimize both the SOAP application processing time and the bandwidth required to transmit the SOAP message over the network. In short, XML needs to be optimized for Web services. This is the exactly what the Web Service Optimization technology does.
Optimization enables Web service endpoints to identify large binary message payloads, remove the message payloads from the body of the SOAP message, encode the message payloads using a encoding mechanism that removes all white space (effectively reducing the size of the files), re-insert the message payloads into the SOAP message as attachments (the file is linked to the SOAP message body by means of an Include tag).
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About Advanced Web Service Interoperability When Should Message Optimization be Used? |
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