Re: SOAP performance

On Oct 27, 2004, at 12:55 PM, Robert van Engelen wrote:

>
> The gSOAP toolkit [4][5] essentially generates a recursive descent 
> parser for an XML schema, i.e. the parser is specifically optimized to 
> consume instances of that schema [2][5]. The results of this 
> "schema-specific" parsing approach on performance are available in [3] 
> and a comparison to even faster techniques is presented in [1]. To 
> corroborate Steele's results, another interesting real-world 
> application (SNMP) is discussed in [6] and [7], which also 
> investigates native formats compared to XML with and w/o compression.
>
>

I'm a bit unclear on real-world use cases for schema-specific XML 
parsing.  That seems to create a tight coupling between the sender and 
receiver (both have to know the schema to interoperate), and 
intermediaries such as WS-Security aware firewalls that can't plausibly 
know the schema are infeasible.  In other words, that defeats the whole 
purpose of SOAP/XML, as far as I can tell:  If both sides know each 
other's schema, why not just exchange serialized objects?  If you can't 
use the SOAP processing model (e.g. intermediaries that can add and 
process headers), why bother with SOAP?

What am I missing?