From 2.0 to 20 TPS

NEW DELHI: As more and more enterprises are adopting the service oriented architecture the need for fast Web services is rising. 'Moving from pilot to production,' is the basic need of the hour comments Frank Cohen, author of the book FastSOA and principal maintainer of the TestMaker open source test utility and framework.

FastSOA, is being considered as an alternative architecture that utilizes XML Query Language (XQuery) and a native XML database at midtier to solve scalability and performance issues of Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server approaches. Said an online report.

Assessing 'speed' as the main problem with the Web services built using the available commercial and open source J2EE application servers, Cohen opines that the same can be overcome using FastSOA. "We are expecting FastSOA to deliver performance in the 15 to 20 TPS range, and expect that FastSOA will spark a wide effort to optimize SOA performance overall." said Cohen.

Non-availability of tool sets for SOA development and policy system or caching mechanism to know if a request has been handled recently are main reasons behind the slow performance of existing Web services, opines Cohen. FastSOA addresses these problems by introducing a 'midtier'. This tier runs a XQuery to handle incoming Web services request and makes use of a native XML database to handle caching, leading to performance scalability of up to 15-20 transactions per second (TPS) from the existing 1.0 to 2.0 TPS.

FastSOA can be used for Web service development on Java as well as the .Net platform. Though the same is yet to be tested on .Net deployments but Cohen is sure of a performance boost as .Net uses document literal encoding as the basis of a SOA tool set and document literal encoding scales, giving an edge to .Net.

In a test study commissioned by Raining Data, Cohen will be testing FastSOA using Raining Data's TigerLogic as the XQuery engine and native XML database. The tests will run on BEA WebLogic server, using Mark Logic as an XML server, eXist-an open source native XML database and Oracle to compare relational technology. Currently a team of developers is building the code for these tests, which are expected to be complete by end of this month.

While not an open source technology in the true sense, FastSOA's status will be decided by Raining Data. Currently the team is collecting developer feedback on FastSOA at http://www.xquerynow.com, an online community sponsored by Raining Data. Also available are chapters from Cohen's upcoming book, FastSOA, for download.