A Performance Analysis of J2ME Web Services Extension

Web Services (WS) technologies have considerably matured in the last years and are considered one of the most promising way to overcome interoperability problems among distributed systems. Their main success factor is the adoption of technologies like Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Service Description Language (WSDL) based on widely known standards like HTTP and XML. Originally their field of applications was business to business (b2b) interaction, but recently several projects identified this combination of technologies as an interesting communication mechanism for grid- and meta- computing too. The scenario where WS have had the most recent adoption is, however, mobile computing. In fact, the first client-side WS API implementation for Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) has been provided in 2004 by Sun. In this paper we evaluate the J2ME WS extension and we compare it with a Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) implementation like the Apache Axis client API. Our interest comes out from the consideration that in a mobile system the WS standards implementation has to be optimized because of the limited computational resources offered by a mobile device. The main contribution of our work is a neutral comparison between the standard approach and the mobile approach made with a software configuration able to run directly the J2ME code on a standard PC architecture without an emulation layer