Bringing simplicity at reduced costs
April 25, 2006 Web services and SOA were designed to bring platform simplicity, at much lower costs. However, many companies have added new burdens in their application platforms with the significant overhead and added expenses of processing multiple XML messages. However, there is a way to cut through the overhead, says Nash. He observes that there has been growing interest in “gateway approaches” to XML and SOA, which offload processing from the existing application infrastructure. An intermediary or gateway can handle schema validations, active security transformations, including signing, encryption, inclusion of credentials, translation of identities, and mapping. Even IBM understands the value of this offloading approach. Nash points to IBM’s acquisition of DataPower as evidence that even IBM’s WebSphere group recognizes the need for gateway intermediaries. “Folks we’ve talked to have said, ‘the performance we see coming out of back-end platforms is generally pretty appalling. We’re still looking at 300 to 400 transactions a second.’ There has to be a much more effective way of dealing with this.’”  That, Nash continues, “is part of the reason why we’re seeing network intermediaries become so successful. If you think about the cost of a back-end application server, you have to multiply that by 15 to 20 times to get the kind of performance improvement you get through a gateway. We’re literally doing anywhere from 10 to 20 times in performance enhancements over what we see on the platforms. If you think about what it takes to actually do the equivalent on platforms, that’s a huge overhead.” To some extent, since gateway devices and solutions perform functions such as validation and virtualization, their roles may overlap with those of enterprise service buses. In fact, ESBs have their place in such arrangements, if only the market could agree on what an ESB is, Nash states. “ESBs are actually a very useful technology, but they’re somewhat limited,” he says. “The way they’re defining ESBs is so generalized that it’s almost impossible to know what the heck one is these days. An ESB encompasses everything, but nothing in particular is an ESB.” Interoperability is another issue with ESBs, Nash observes. “As soon as you start to look at more than one ESB or more than one message queue in an organization, you have interoperability issues. If you’ve got both BEA and IBM in there, how do the ESBs communicate? What’s the consistency there?”  Nash observes that ESB-based services can be exposed as Web services interfaces that can be shared with other ESBs, but this builds on the overhead and complexity. “If you actually look at what happens, you convert from a Web service interface into a message queue infrastructure, and sometimes more than one message queue,” he explains. “Then, when you actually want to pop out the other side at another Web service, you have to reconvert the information back again, to make use of it as a Web service again. You end up with all these multiple crossings of the technology, which is not very efficient.” In many instances, Nash even considers ESBs “to be a retrograde step.” He notes that a native Web services implementations accelerated by XML network intermediaries may be the best way “of insuring you have the broadest possible access in a consistent way to services, as opposed to trying to interpose ESBs into these solutions.” Source: Web Services.org  Have your website professionally optimized by the search engine positioning experts at Rank for $ales. If your site has dropped in rankings since November 16, 2003, contact the search engine positioning experts at Rank for Sales. Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it. For the best technical information on hardware, software, Internet applications, e-Commerce, B2B, Web services or IT-related industry news, visit Tech Blog. Reciprocal Link Exchange Program: If your company is engaged in the business of Web Services, the development of related Internet application, ecommerce or B2B development, Internet security services, Web hosting services or is involved in professional Search Engine Optimization, My Web Services is seriously interested in a worthwhile Reciprocal Link Exchange Trading Program with your company. Click here to get all the details.
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