The goal of the thesis ?automatic configuration of distributed system with XML? was to evaluate possible alternatives to the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol, used by info management systems Inc.

After the analysis of the existing solution several protocols have been examined as a potential replacement. From the five protocols RMI, DCOM, CORBA, XML-RPC and SOAP, the last two were selected, since the others were not able to fulfill all the necessary requirements.

In comparison XML-RPC and SOAP are both offering a large amount of functions (support of object-oriented programming, bundling of multiple calls, special packet treatment for firewalls). Unfortunately we couldn?t find any usage of those functions for the specific application of info management systems Inc.

RPC, XML-RPC and SOAP have also been tested for efficiency between different protocols, as well as between different languages within the same protocol.

Although the transfer rate is approximately located in the same range, the choice of the transmission protocol (UDP/TCP) has influence in details such as broadcasting. We also found some interesting differences in the handling of a larger amount of concurrent clients.

If there are no compelling reasons for using XML as a coding standard, we would advise not to change the existing system.