Why Is HTTP/SOAP considered to be “thick”

Question

I\'ve heard some opinions that the SOAP/HTTP web service call stack is \"thick\" or \"heavyweight,\" but I can\'t really pinpoint why. Would it be considered thick because

Answer 1

I considered it "thick" because of the relatively large overhead involved with packaging and unpacking a message (serializing and deserializing).

Consider a web service with a web method called Add that takes two 32-bit integers. The caller packages up two integers and receive a single integer in reply. Where there's really only 96 bits of information being transmitted, the addition of the SOAP packets will probably add around 3,000 or more extra bits in each direction. A 30x increase.

Added to this is the relatively slow performance associated with serializing and deserializing the message into UTF-8 (or whatever) XML. Admittedly it's pretty fast these days, but it's certainly not trivial.