Cook Computing

A long time ago I posted how to write an XML-RPC service using an ASHX file. In case anyone is interested, here is a VB.NET sample:

<%@ WebHandler Language="VB" Class="Test" %>
<%@ Assembly Name="CookComputing.XmlRpc" %>

Imports CookComputing.XmlRpc

<XmlRpcService> _
Public Class Test
  Inherits XmlRpcService

	<XmlRpcMethod> _
	Public Function Square(ByVal x As Integer) As Integer
		Return x * x
	End Function

End Class

Note that the XML-RPC.NET assembly must be in the bin subdirectory of the directory containing the ASHX file.

XML-based Web Services look great in theory but I had one nagging thought last week while on the WSA course: what about performance? From my experience with VoiceXML over the last year it is obvious that processing XML can soak up a lot of CPU and I was therefore interested to see this blog post by Jon Udell in which he describes how Groove had problems with XML:

Sayonara, top-to-bottom XML I don't believe that I pay a performance penalty for using XML, and depending on how you use XML, you may not believe that you do either. But don't tell that to Jack Ozzie. The original architectural pillars of Groove were COM, for software extensibility, and XML, for data extensibility. In V3 the internal XML datastore switches over to a binary record-oriented database.

You can't argue with results: after beating his brains out for a couple of years, Jack can finally point to a noticeable speedup in an app that has historically struggled even on modern hardware. The downside? Debugging. It was great to be able to look at an internal Groove transaction and simply be able to read it, Jack says, and now he can't. Hey, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelette.

Is a binary representation of the XML Infoset a useful way of improving performance when handling XML? Would it make a big enough difference?

I just came across the IT Conversations site. Some possibly interesting interviews with people such as Bruce Schneier, Phil Zimmerman, Steve McConnell. I've downloaded a few for burning onto cd and listening to on my journeys between Yorkshire and London.

I attended the DevelopMentor course Essential WSA: Programming Web Services with WSE last week, with Simon Horrell as the instructor. Other than playing with some ASMX web service samples I've not done anything with web services - Remoting has been the key area in my work over the last year - and the course proved to be an excellent immersion into web services, the various WS_* specifications and how they are implemented in Web Services Enhancements. There were only three of us on the course - hi to Geoff and Eric - so was this an indication of the level of interest in web services in the UK, or just the fact that the end of the course coincided with a long public holiday weekend? Actually Eric had come over from Switzerland so only two from the UK and neither of us are currently doing any web service work. To be fair Simon did say that WSE is really aimed at early adopters of web services and that it will be superceded by Indigo, so maybe its too early yet to see a huge amount of interest in this area.

The Mono team has announced the beta 1 release of Mono. Read the release notes here or download here.