Simon Fell > Its just code > WS-FTP

Monday, January 30, 2006

WS-FTP, so many bad ideas in a single project, nice going !. Lets see, it sends chunks of a file over SOAP, it doesn't use any binary packaging scheme for this, so you take a 4/3 bandwidth / filesize hit (i.e. you spend at least 4Mb of bandwidth to send a 3Mb file). The chunking is done via multiple SOAP calls, so you're spending lots of round trips (remember, round trips are evil). All this to get a chunked upload, when in fact HTTP supports this out of the box, you can do this in a single HTTP call using PUT with chunked encoding (if you don't know the starting size). I guess you end up in this mess trying to paste over the holes in the .NET http client. No wonder Web Services have such a bad name.

You know its bad when I feel like I'm channeling Mark Baker!