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.

W3C Issues Key Web Services Standards

Zapthink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said the idea of making XML more efficient is becoming more popular, noting that businesses will ramp up the amount of XML they employ in their networks, expanding from 15 percent today to almost 50 percent by 2008.

Schmelzer said the fact that XOP aims to allow XML to support large binary media types is an indication of the prevalence in which XML is being used for new applications that are outside the bounds originally conceived of for the language. MTOM and RRSHB, Schmelzer told internetnews.com, will boost efficiency by trimming the traffic that SOAP messages can create.

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.