| Web services have recently emerged as a de facto standard for building Grid and distributed computing infrastructures and applications. SOAP, a simple, interoperable, robust, and extensible protocol for the exchange of messages, is the most widely used communication protocol in the Web services model. SOAP's XML-based message format hinders its performance, thus making it unsuitable in many scientific applications. The deserialization of SOAP messages, which includes processing of XML data and conversion of strings to in-memory data types, is the major performance bottleneck in a SOAP message exchange.; The contributions of this dissertation address SOAP's poor deserialization performance with the design and implementation of differential deserialization (DDS), an optimization technique that exploits similarities between incoming messages to reduce deserialization time. DDS is a fully SOAP compliant technique, and requires no changes to a SOAP client.; A performance study demonstrates that DDS can result in performance improvements up to 226% for some Web services. When DDS is used with differential serialization (DS), its sender-side analog, the performance study demonstrates even more significant performance improvements. |
