We are transferring java object representation of XML as data returned by a SOAP/WSDL webservice.
I was under the impression that since its a object being returned by the webservice, we are using binary data transfer (as opposed to sending XML strings across).
However, i am a bit confused about the concept of binary serialization. Apparently this needs to be done for large data transfer. How is this different from what we are doing?
XML serialization is usually more verbose than an optimized binary serialization of the same data. For better interoperability though, XML is usually preferred for web services.
Hessian is an example of a binary web service protocol. SOAP is primarily XML based.