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Re: Pushing all the buttons

• To: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: Re: Pushing all the buttons
• From: Marc Hadley <Marc.Hadley@S...>
• Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 11:26:14 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:

> The problem with this approach is that it's very platform specific,
> as binary approaches have always been.

Not if its based on a platform agnostic binary data serialization, see 
below.

> I suspect Sun's approach will
> work well for Java. But will it work well for C? What's the
> performance impact when byte orders need to be flipped when
> deserializing? I doubt very much Sun can get an order of magnitude
> improvement on all platforms of interest, much less with all
> documents of interest. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if their data
> optimizations for Java actually decrease performance for programs
> written in Perl, C, or other languages.
>
For the record, there's nothing Java specific about the encoding. Data 
is encoded using ASN.1 Packed Encoding Rules (PER). ASN.1 was around 
long before Java, PER is not based on Java serialization. I would 
expect a C based ASN.1 PER library to perform as well as a Java 
equivalent.

> I very much suspect Sun's proposal would have the "accidental" effect
> of strongly encouraging developers to use Java. Of course, it will
> work if you use C# or Perl, but it will work better with Java.

Of course Sun will strive to make its implementation best-of-breed, the 
old Sun mantra "Cooperate on standards, compete on implementation" 
still applies. If this encourages more developers to use Java then 
that's great. However, there's nothing in the fast web services work 
that skews the performance characteristics in favor of Java over other 
languages.

Regards,
Marc.

--
Marc Hadley <marc.hadley@s...>
Web Technologies and Standards, Sun Microsystems.

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