Speed differential between RESTFul webservices and RMI

[Tim Sparg]

My company is gearing up to migrate our legacy application to Java - more specifically a Netbeans RCP frontend and a EJB 3 backend.

We are looking at using RESTful web services as communication layer, however their where some concerns raised about how much slower RESTful WS would be than RMI.
In the end I decided to run some tests to see how bad the times actually where as opposed to everybodies certified opinions!

The test was a 10 000 person(with contact Details) transfer from App Server to client.
(source code will follow at the bottom of the post)
My table headers doesn't seem to want to align and I have no idea why there is a massive gap in my post. If somebody knows how to fix it, please do so

RMI	REST-xml	REST-json
POI	Actual Time	Time btwn POI	Actual Time	Time btwn POI	Actual Time	Time btwn POI
startup	20:06:07.7		20:14:35.35		20:21:07.7
beforeInit	20:06:09.9	00:00:02.2	20:14:35.35	00:00:00.0	20:21:07.7	00:00:00.0
beforeFirst	20:06:16.16	00:00:07.7	20:14:36.36	00:00:01.1	20:21:08.8	00:00:01.1
AfterFirst	20:06:37.37	00:00:21.21	20:14:52.52	00:00:16.16	20:21:25.25	00:00:17.17
AfterSecond	20:06:55.55	00:00:18.18	20:15:00.0	00:00:08.8	20:21:36.36	00:00:11.11
Total Time	00:00:47.47		00:00:25.25		00:00:29.29

(My table headers doesn't seem to want to align, if somebody has better html editing skill than me, please fix it!)


These test results are completely out of whack with everything that I understand about RMI, how can web services be almost twice as fast?
Does the appServer interfere with the RMI, and if that is the case, why doesn't it interfere with the web services?

Here is the Entity that is being sent over the wire, note the multiple contactDetails beneath the Person

 
package com.blah;

import java.io.Serializable;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.UUID;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

/**
 *
 * @author tsparg
 */
@XmlRootElement
public class Person implements Serializable {

    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private Date birthday;
    private double salary;
    private ContactDetails[] contactDetails;

    public Person() {
        firstName = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
        lastName = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
        birthday = new Date();
        salary = Math.random();

        contactDetails = new ContactDetails[]{
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails(),
                    new ContactDetails()
                };
    }

    public Date getBirthday() {
        return birthday;
    }

    public void setBirthday(Date birthday) {
        this.birthday = birthday;
    }

    public ContactDetails[] getContactDetails() {
        return contactDetails;
    }

    public void setContactDetails(ContactDetails[] contactDetails) {
        this.contactDetails = contactDetails;
    }

    public String getFirstName() {
        return firstName;
    }

    public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
    }

    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }

    public void setLastName(String lastName) {
        this.lastName = lastName;
    }

    public double getSalary() {
        return salary;
    }

    public void setSalary(double salary) {
        this.salary = salary;
    }
}

 

package com.blah;

import java.io.Serializable;
import java.util.UUID;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

/**
 *
 * @author tsparg
 */
@XmlRootElement
public class ContactDetails  implements Serializable {

    private String homePhone;
    private String cellPhone;
    private String fax;

    public ContactDetails() {
        homePhone = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
        cellPhone = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
        fax = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
    }

    public String getCellPhone() {
        return cellPhone;
    }

    public void setCellPhone(String cellPhone) {
        this.cellPhone = cellPhone;
    }

    public String getFax() {
        return fax;
    }

    public void setFax(String fax) {
        this.fax = fax;
    }

    public String getHomePhone() {
        return homePhone;
    }

    public void setHomePhone(String homePhone) {
        this.homePhone = homePhone;
    }
}

RMI SPECIFICS

  package com.bean;

import com.blah.Person;
import javax.ejb.Remote;

/**
 *
 * @author tsparg
 */
@Remote
public interface TestEJBRemote {

    Person [] getPeople();
    
}
  

    
package com.bean;

import com.blah.Person;
import javax.ejb.Stateless;

/**
 *
 * @author tsparg
 */
@Stateless
public class TestEJB implements TestEJBRemote {

    public Person [] getPeople() {
        Person [] people = new Person[10000];
        for (int i = 0; i < people.length; i++) {
            people[i] = new Person();
        }
        return people;
    }
    
  
}

    
package testclient;

import com.bean.TestEJBRemote;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Properties;
import javax.naming.InitialContext;
import javax.naming.NamingException;

/**
 *
 * @author tsparg
 */
public class MainPeople {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Date startup = new Date();
        Date beforeFirst = null;
        Date beforeInit = null;
        Date afterFirst = null;
        Date afterSecond = null;

        try {
            Properties props = new Properties();
            props.load(new FileInputStream("jndi.properties"));
            InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext(props);
            beforeInit = new Date();
            TestEJBRemote testEJB = (TestEJBRemote) ctx.lookup("com.bean.TestEJBRemote");
            beforeFirst = new Date();
            testEJB.getPeople();
            afterFirst = new Date();
            testEJB.getPeople();
            afterSecond = new Date();
        } catch (NamingException nex) {
            nex.printStackTrace();
        } catch (FileNotFoundException fnfex) {
            fnfex.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException ioex) {
            ioex.printStackTrace();
        }

        SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("HH:mm:ss.S");
        System.out.println(df.format(startup));
        System.out.println(df.format(beforeInit));
        System.out.println(df.format(beforeFirst));
        System.out.println(df.format(afterFirst));
        System.out.println(df.format(afterSecond));
    }
}

REST WS SPECIFICS

  
package com.restful;

import com.blah.Person;
import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.ws.rs.GET;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;
import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType;

/**
 *
 * @author tsparg
 */
@Path("/hello")
@Stateless
public class HelloRestWorld {


    @GET
    @Produces({MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML})
    public Person [] getPeople() {
        Person[] people = new Person[10000];
        for (int i = 0; i < people.length; i++) {
            people[i] = new Person();
        }
        return people;
    }
}
  

    
package restclient;

import com.blah.ContactDetails;
import com.blah.Person;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.Client;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.UniformInterfaceException;
import com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

/**
 *
 * @author tsparg
 */
public class MainPeople {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Date startup = new Date();
        Date beforeFirst = null;
        Date beforeInit = null;
        Date afterFirst = null;
        Date afterSecond = null;

        beforeInit = new Date();
        HelloRestWorld_JerseyClient client = new HelloRestWorld_JerseyClient();

        beforeFirst = new Date();
        client.getPeople_JSON(new Person[]{}.getClass());
        afterFirst = new Date();
        Person[] people_JSON = client.getPeople_JSON(new Person[]{}.getClass());
        afterSecond = new Date();

        for (Person person : people_JSON) {
            System.out.println(person.getFirstName());
            ContactDetails[] details = person.getContactDetails();
            for (ContactDetails contactDetails : details) {
                System.out.println("details: " + contactDetails.getCellPhone());
            }
        }

        SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("HH:mm:ss.S");
        System.out.println(df.format(startup));
        System.out.println(df.format(beforeInit));
        System.out.println(df.format(beforeFirst));
        System.out.println(df.format(afterFirst));
        System.out.println(df.format(afterSecond));
    }

    static class HelloRestWorld_JerseyClient {

        private WebResource webResource;
        private Client client;
        private static final String BASE_URI = "http://localhost:8080/restWeb/resources";

        public HelloRestWorld_JerseyClient() {
            com.sun.jersey.api.client.config.ClientConfig config = new com.sun.jersey.api.client.config.DefaultClientConfig();
            client = Client.create(config);
            webResource = client.resource(BASE_URI).path("hello");
        }

        public String getMessage() throws UniformInterfaceException {
            return webResource.accept(javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType.TEXT_PLAIN).get(String.class);
        }

        public <T> T getPeople_XML(Class<T> responseType) throws UniformInterfaceException {
            return webResource.accept(javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType.APPLICATION_XML).get(responseType);
        }

        public <T> T getPeople_JSON(Class<T> responseType) throws UniformInterfaceException {
            return webResource.accept(javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON).get(responseType);
        }

        public void close() {
            client.destroy();
        }
    }