High Performance SOA

In the world of information technology, the concept of abstractions are particularly handy. Take, for example, the Services abstraction at the heart of SOA, which masks the complexity of the underlying technology implementation while presenting composable business Services to internal and external users. But every abstraction comes at a price, …

Rogue Wave Software Announces General Availability of Rogue Wave Hydra Suite Version 3.0

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Rogue Wave Hydra empowers IT architects and professional developers to achieve order-of-magnitude performance and throughput improvements for critical software applications. Rogue Wave Hydra is based on Rogue Wave Software’s pioneering “Pipelines” technology and associated methodology, which focuses on achieving efficiency and scalability through parallel processing. Pipelines allow for efficient execution and distribution of software components or services for simultaneous processing on available resources. This peer-to-peer architecture minimizes bottlenecks and allows businesses to achieve new levels of throughput and performance. According to research firm ZapThink, 50 percent of the total services-oriented software market will have high-performance requirements by 2010.

Read more at: RogueWave Press Release

ZapForum Webcast — Practical Approaches for Optimizing SOA Performance

“Practical Approaches To Optimizing SOA Performance”

Guest Experts: Michael Leventhal, Sr. Director, XML Products, Tarari and Tim Triemstra, VP, Product Strategy, Rogue Wave Software

Topics:

• Understand where the performance bottlenecks are
• What are the tricks and techniques for surmounting efficiency problems?
• Learn about software, hardware, and other means for optimizing performance …
  

Solving the Very Large Messaging Problem in the Enterprise

Companies are increasingly seeking to tie together their disparate enterprise using the promising, but emerging technologies of XML, Web Services, and Service-Oriented Architectures. These approaches promise significant business agility in the face of IT heterogeneity. However, these benefits come at a price: performance and efficiency. As the network traffic increases due to the increasing size and volume of messages, both XML and non-XML based, existing corporate IT infrastructure will be taxed to its limit. General-purpose application servers, network equipment, and messaging infrastructure will be increasingly devoted to simple message parsing, handling, and routing functions, while precious few resources will be left to execute the core business logic so important to companies.

Research shows that the quantity and size of these metadata-laden messages won’t be decreasing soon. Developers and specifications bodies continue to tax messaging systems with additional layers of headers and metadata meant to abstract underlying infrastructure. Increasingly large message size, along with a general increase in message volume, combine to create the challenge of Very Large Messaging (VLM).

Previous approaches to solving distributed messaging problems, including messaging middleware, ESB, and application servers, were not designed to handle the challenges of VLM. Emerging approaches such as hardware appliances and binary XML, may solve part of the overall VLM problem, but fail to provide a comprehensive approach that targets all systems, networks, and processing infrastructure that runs within the corporate IT environment. Further, while these approaches may remove some of the overhead of message parsing, they offer no direct benefit to assimilating and utilitizing these messages within applications.

As a result, new approaches are needed to deal with messages being exchanged on the network that are exceeding the capabilities of the general purpose hardware and software that is now being applied to the problem. How can efficient content-level message processing be distributed to all the nodes in a corporate network? How can dumb networks be made more intelligent through the ability to process data and metadata it formerly ignored? In this paper, approaches to the “Very Large Messaging” (VLM) problem, and potential optimal solutions that hope to break the stalemate in network processing of data are presented.

The Might of XML

Current XML parsers are not very effective. The APIs (define) have just as much trouble reading large file types in an efficient manner as they do reading multiple small file types.

This stresses out current processors, which power the application server to deliver content. Research firm ZapThink said this poses a problem because it believes corporations will continue to ramp up the amount of XML they employ in their networks, expanding from 15 percent today to almost 50 percent by 2008.

With the glamour of Web services steeped in the possibility of processing thousands or even millions of transactions on a network, the threat that insufficient XML consumption could tie up computer systems is very real. ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said customers and vendors have expressed concern about XML’s ability to underpin Web services.

He admitted the problems with XML processing put a damper on the research company’s prognostication for the multi-billion-dollar growth for service-oriented architectures and distributed computing.

ZapThink’s Schmelzer said the glut of XML is thick enough to bear a large market in which the likes of DataPower and Rogue Wave can sell their wares. He predicted the XML performance optimization market will reach $1.2 billion by 2010.

Read more at: InternetNews

The SOA Implementation Framework

The world of distributed computing is currently in the midst of a major transition, as tightly coupled, integration-centric approaches gradually lose favor and give way to loosely coupled, Service-oriented computing techniques. At the core of this trend are Service-oriented architectures (SOAs), which promise greater flexibility in the way that companies produce and consume IT assets, in particular when IT environments are heterogeneous and business requirements are dynamic.

However, building SOAs is challening for most organizations, for several reasons: they involve a different way of thinking about software resources, they require a level of architectural discipline, and companies need a range of software solutions to build, run, and manage an SOA. In particular, companies need a framework of capabilities that include access to data sources and the composition of Services into business processes in a secure, managed environment.

Today, most enterprises must purchase a range of products to assemble the software they need to build an SOA. However, there is a new class of product called the SOA Implementation Framework that offers all the elements a company would need to build and run an SOA. Such frameworks are only now coming to market, but one such framework, Rogue Wave Platform X, from Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx, is well-positioned to be a leader in this nascent market for comprehensive SOA software frameworks.

AmberPoint Extends Market Leadership with Marquee New Customers and Strategic Relationships

“The addition of these significant names to AmberPoint’s customer roster speaks to the strength of their solutions,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. “This indicates that the Web services management market is continuing the growth we’ve predicted.”

Read more at: Amberpoint Press Release

AmberPoint Greenlighted By Numerous New Customers

“The addition of these significant names to AmberPoint’s customer roster speaks to the strength of their solutions,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink. “This indicates that the Web services management market is continuing the growth we’ve predicted.”

Read more at: eBizQ.net

Service Orientation Market Trends

While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.

In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.

These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.

The Web services interoperability group unfurls a practical business use scenario for running

ZapThink Senior Analyst Jason Bloomberg said the delivery of the sample applications will free WS-I up to conduct other interoperability tests.

Now that these deliverables are off the WS-I’s plate, they can focus more specifically on building the interoperability profile for Web Services security — a tougher problem than basic interoperability, but every bit as important, Bloomberg told internetnews.com .

Read more at: ASP News