Binary Serialization between Netweaver/Java web service and .NET consumer

Question

I'm on a project that exposes ABAP functionality as a web service via Netweaver / Java (7.01 SP3 I think). We consume it on an .NET 4 UI tier. We are dealing with some large message structures (12MB serialized XML) that are taking too many seconds to shuttle between the various tiers.

We're tackling this performance on a number of fronts:

• Disk, network, CPU and memory are fine and nowhere near saturated.
• We're working to trial WCF Streaming mode
• We may try gzip compression on the web service's server
• And lastly, the point of this question: is there a way to enable binary serialization that's interoperable?

Answer 1

Assuming that you already tried everything to get the payload size down and to split it into smaller pieces (12 MB XML, seriously!), I'd say that depends on the kind of XML processing you need on the ABAP side. You could try to implement your own ICF HTTP handlers and go for some REST-style interface. This is especially interesting if you really want to transfer binary data (for example, some document you retrieve from an archive system) because you can then transfer the document via HTTP without the XML-binary-ugliness. Even if you have to use fill WSDL-y web services, you could try to refactor the binary parts out of that interface, just send some (GU)ID through the web service and have the client fetch the binary part from your custom ICF handler.