PreviouslyI listed the top ten reasons why to go slow with transactional Web Services – as implied in SOA and ESB (see Web Services note). Well another cautionary tale has arrived on XML use – this time picking up on my 4th point, XML can be performance challenged. See the following article over at XMLMania – which comes by way of Zap Think. This report confirms real world experience with bulk XML processing versus ETL program based transfers of warehouse data, even on a highspeed LAN.

It is interesting that we just featured Nexawebs use of XML in their presentation system for the Web API. What we did not mention was the 2 optimizations so Nexaweb can reduce both XML and network traffic: 1)compression of the XML and 2)smart caching of XML (and other data) so only deltas have to be sent over the network wire. So smart systems vendors are starting to optimize XML performance already. If you have any other examples of XML optimizations, please add a comment or send us a note.

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