The format of data and the protocol used to exchange it is a determining factor in the degree of interoperability among applications. The lack of a reliable, universally understood data-exchange format has long limited effective communication between heterogenous systems. XML is essentially a tree-oriented data representation language that is simple to generate and parse. Also, HTTP has emerged as a simple, universally supported protocol for exchanging data over the Internet. Thus, moving XML data via HTTP is an attractive way for distributed applications to communicate with each other.
SOAP does precisely that.
However, Nexus has robustness problems and the failure of a global pointer can lead to complete deadlock of the distributed computation. Java RMI tends to be more robust, partly because of Java's exception and error-handling system. However, when additional performance is needed a multi-protocol approach allows a faster, more specialized protocol to be dynamically inserted to move data. Analogously, our work suggests that rather than try to extend a single communications subsystem to handle the wide range of scientific computing requirements, the more effective solution is to use multiple communication protocols.