Toward Remote Object Coherence with Compiled Object Serialization for Distributed Computing with XML Web Services

Cross-platform object-level coherence in Web services-based distributed systems and grids requires lossless serialization to ensure programming-language specific objects are safely transmitted, manipulated, and stored. However, Web services development tools often suffer from lossy forms of XML serialization, which diminishes the usefulness of XML Web services as a competitive approach to binary protocols. The difficulty mainly originates from the impedance mismatch between programming language data types and XML schema types. To overcome this obstacle, we propose hybrid static/dynamic algorithms to support lossless serialization of programming-language specific binary-encoded object graphs to text-based XML trees, while staying within the limits imposed by XML schema validation and the XSD type system. This paper presents a compiler-based approach to automatically emit serialization routines for C and C++ data types to XML. Experimental results show that the presented compiler-based serialization is efficient and performance is comparable to systems that use binary protocols.