The Site Formerly Known as Bit Working This site has moved to http://bitworking.org

One more tweak to the CSS for this site. Now if you load up the page and don't have JavaScript turned on, or a browser that doesn't support 'display:none', you will see a message that explains that you aren't getting the full BitWorking Experience(tm).

Mark and Sam seemed a little surprised at lunch today that I was using SOAP in such a small environment. To me it's not such a stretch because SOAP may be verbose, but it's not heavy. Which means that while SOAP messages can be large you don't need to keep all the information in memory at one time, SOAP messages can be parsed in a single pass. In addition the syntax of XML is trivial to parse. The only drawback is the actual size of the messages may consume too much bandwidth over a small pipe. Please note the difference, a small platform is capable of handling SOAP but a small communication channel may not be. For example, let's look at sending this message, borrowed from Sam Ruby's A Gentle Introduction to SOAP

<SOAP:Envelope xmlns:SOAP="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
  <SOAP:Body>
    <m:getStateName xmlns:m="http://www.soapware.org/">
      <statenum>41</statenum>
    </m:getStateName>
  </SOAP:Body>
</SOAP:Envelope>

Which by my count is 199 characters long, after removing the unnecessary whitespace. If we send this over a 9600 baud line, which averages about 1000 bytes/s you will only be able to send 5 of these messages a second. Since we have to send the message and get a response that means about 2.5 round-trips per second, assuming the response is about the same size as the message. The latency of a system can be critical in embedded systems and 2.5 Hz is pretty slow. What to do, what to do....