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by Udi Dahan.
Original Post: Re: XML vs. Web Service, Who Wins?
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I flagged this for followup some time ago, but it just got lost in the shuffle. Brent (?) put up a great post called "XML vs. Web Service, Who Wins?" where he dispells the WebServices Everything Everywhere anti-pattern. In the example he uses, a read-only XML file ended up being a much simpler, and almost definitely more performant solution than using Web Services.
If there was one thing that I'd add to his solution is to use some kind of notification mechanism (publish) that would let all subscribers know that the data in the XML file had changed. This would be preferable to having each subscriber polling for changes. You could use Web Services to implement such a mechanism, but shucks, the WS-Eventing spec is only now getting nailed down and it might take some time for the implementations to get out, not to mention the kinks worked out of them. I'll bet you could use some other, simple notification mechanism instead.
So, the question isn't really XML vs. Web Services, but rather today's stable, already in use techniques vs. tomorrow's hyped up, not yet stable technologies. If you had to build a mission critical system, what would you bet your job on?
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