Question

Lets assume I develop two services called ProductAPI and OrderAPI.Both of them uses a Common Domain Model (common Entity hierarchy).

Both of the services are finally exposed as RCP (SOAP or REST).
The OrderAPI internally invokes ProductAPI.

In the case of the REST:

We can develop ProductAPI using JAX-RS and we can implement a “ProductAPI REST Client” to be used within OrderAPI to access ProductAPI.

This client can use the same class heirachy to deserialize the JSON into the same classes used in ProductAPI.

So,no indermediate format convertion.

In the case of SOAP:

We develop the ProductAPI using JAX-WS (or Axis2..etc) and expose the service in WSDL.
In this case, we have to implement a “ProductAPI SOAP Client” using the exposed WSDL.(may be using a stub generation tool using the exposed WSDL).

In this came the generated Classes are generated from the XSD definition in WSDL and we have to do additional format conversion if we want to use the same Common Domain Model classes.

My questions:

1) In the case of SOAP is there a way to skip this format conversion ?

2) In an enterprise application (like eCommerce) , is it a good practice to avoid this kind of middle data conversions for performance?

Answer 1

1. To move data between processes, the data needs to be serialized. You can certainly use a different and better format than SOAP for the serialized data, but if you already have SOAP, it will be more work.

2. Is it worth trading programmer effort for performance in this kind of project? My guess is no, since the performance will probably be good enough anyway. And if it isn’t, the usual advice is to measure and identify bottlenecks before optimizing anything.