Question

I need to make a decision between using Ruby vs. Java for SOAP integration. My entire web application is built on Ruby on Rails, and there is a significant back-end component that has to integrate with legacy systems using SOAP.

Java has extensive SOAP libraries like Apache Axis and seems to integrate very well with this type of “legacy” web services while Ruby has some gems like Savon and handSOAP.

I’m biased towards using Ruby libraries, but am concerned about performance / scalability issues. What are the performance/scalability issues attached with using Ruby?

To get more context, the integration with the legacy system has two components: a daily process, whose performance is less important, and a realtime query engine, whose performance is very important because users are waiting while the query is being handled.

Answer 1

I faced the same challenge recently. I originally went with Java, but wound up porting everything over to Ruby using Builder to construct the requests and Nokogiri for parsing the responses. I also use SoapUI to help with development/debugging of requests.

Why did I wind up going with Ruby over Java…

1. Simpler infrastructure. Why have two different paradigms in your architecture if you don’t need it. If your site is Ruby on Rails, why introduce Java into it unless you need it.
2. Java has some nice libraries like Axis to convert SOAP requests to objects. But that really isn’t a big problem., but really that isn’t that much of a win when most of my logic is in Ruby. It was much easier for me just to work with the DOM through Nokogiri than to have intermediary Java objects.
3. All of my logic (ActiveRecord model objects, validation, etc.) were all in Java. I wound up having to replicate logic like database persistence to communicate between the Java code and the Rails code…boo
4. The performance concern seems like a red herring. If you are making SOAP requests, the network overhead will likely be your bottleneck, not the language parsing/executing.