"Wish I was there" -- OSCon 2006 in Portland
Tis once again the season for OSCon. I wish I was there, since the content is of particular interest this year: there are multiple interesting sessions about efficient XML processing, in addition to other generally interesting sessions.
Of particular interest to me was "Building a High Performance XML Router with AsyncWeb and XFire", both because Woodstox powers XFire, but also because AsyncWeb is a very interesting (and relatively new) piece of server-side technology. Whereas XFire is a second generation SOAP processor, AsyncWeb can be viewed as a second generation Servlet-like container (hopefully also influencing design for the next generation of the standard Servlet API itself?). Combining the two should allow significantly more efficient processing of xml messages, both for implementing web services, and for building infrastructure that routes those messages. Realistically, processing speed of a single web service box should be counted in thousands, not in dozens as seems to be the case with the first generation systems (ones using in-memory DOM model, such as Axis 1, with standard servlet containers). So this marriage of "best of breed" components seems very interesting. Stay tuned!
So here is hoping that we will see more convergence with "next generation" xml and message processing tools. Perhaps it will be even possible to get back to high processing speeds, partially lost with naive request/reply processing (over dedicated connections of, say, Corba), and partially with heavy-weight text processing (xml parsing) tools. It is only with such efficiency that increased scalability and higher modularity of Service-Oriented systems really starts to pay off. Up until now it has too often just been an expensive but unwieldy architectural experiment.
