Performance of SOAP in Web Service environment compared to CORBA

Web Services is a new concept that promises flexibility and interconnection between different systems. The communication in Web Services uses SOAP $Simple Object Access Protocol, which is based on XML. We have together with an industrial partner made experiments with SOAP in a Web Service environment to find out the response time using SOAP compared to CORBA. It turns out that a direct and naive use of SOAP would result in a response time degradation of a factor 400 compared to CORBA. We identified the major reasons for the poor performance of SOAP and evaluated some performance improvement techniques. After applying these the techniques, the performance of CORBA is 7 times better compared to SOAP.