A comparative study of SOAP and DCOM

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a recent technology, which aims at replacing traditional methods of remote communications, such as RPC-based Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). Being designed with a goal of increasing interoperability among wide range of programs and environment, SOAP allows applications written in different languages and deployed on different platforms to communicate with each other over the network. While SOAP offers obvious benefits in the world of interoperability, it comes at a price of performance degradation and additional development efforts required for implementation of features missing from SOAP, such as security and state management. This paper reports the outcome of a comparative study of SOAP and DCOM in terms of features, development effort, and application performance. The results indicate that SOAP performance on a homogeneous platform is consistently worse than that of DCOM. Depending on the operation and the amount of data transferred, SOAP performance degradation can range from minor (e.g. two or three times slower than DCOM) to major (e.g. twenty or more times slower).