Web Services

Don MacVittie replies: Don't blame in-house developers' code for Web services' inefficiency. The fault lies with the MSXML, Xalan and Xerces tools, which are horrendous enough to use for regular XML processing, let alone Web services.

As far as I'm concerned, the hype on Web services is through the roof. The technology had better perform well enough to deliver on its proponents' promises.

Customers Reign

Regarding Mike Lee's column "The Trusted Computing Dilemma" (May 27, 2004), it seems we have little to fear from trusted computing as long as the government doesn't mandate it. That's because vendors can't co-opt customers and expect to stay in business over the long haul.Sure, a company such as AOL should be allowed to say which instant-messaging client may be used over its networks. But if its customers decide that's not in their best interests, they'll spend their dollars elsewhere.

David A.E. Wall

Chief Software Architect
Yozons
E-mail address withheld by request

Why Slower?

In "XML Security for Web Apps" (June 10, 2004), Lori MacVittie says that when she configured DataPower's XS40 XML Security Gateway to encrypt just one element, as opposed to the entire response, the device processed only half the number of message pairs while performing SOAP schema validation. Why was that the case?Brad Tumy

Senior Consultant
Company name and e-mail address withheld by request

Lori MacVittie replies: The reason it takes more time for any XML security device to encrypt a single element versus the entire response is that the device must first locate the element to encrypt within the XML document. The process of parsing XML documents is currently the single largest inhibitor of performance when dealing with any kind of XML traffic.

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