An evaluation of XML-RPC

Abstract

This paper explores the complexity and performance of the XML-RPC system for remote method invocation. We developed a program that can use either XML-RPC-based network communication or a hand-rolled version of networking code based on the java.net package. We first compare our two implementations using traditional object-oriented metrics. In addition, we conduct tests over a local network and the Internet to assess the performance of the two versions of the networking code using traditional internetworking metrics. We find that XML-RPC reduces the programming complexity of the software by roughly 50% (across various metrics). On the other hand, the hand-rolled java.net-based implementation offers up to an order of magnitude better network performance in some of our tests.