Implementation of File Transfer Using Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM)

Abstract

Different applications over the Internet uses Web Services to help them for better communication. Using encryption techniques, these applications can send any type of information to each other. W3C recommends MTOM (Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) as the standard for transferring binary files as an attachment to SOAP messages. The basic feature of MTOM is that it does not break the XML info set for transferring binary files. However, the work done so far on efficient processing of SOAP attachments is very little. This paper provides architecture and implementation for sending binary files as attachments using MTOM. The problem with DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation) is that the binary content is sent outside the SOAP Envelope of the XML message. This means that even if your message is secure, the DIME attachment may not be secure. We realized that when MTOM is used, web service automatically handles the encoding of the data in the web service message. The implementation of architecture described in this paper for transferring binary files using MTOM will give approximately 10-20% faster result than DIME. This is because, in MTOM we do not need to package each chunk into the attachment, which is necessary in DIME.