Tom Yohe

Highly scalable implementations of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) always include heavy doses of caching. A guided tour through the SOA tiers, describing the caching and XML acceleration techniques employed along the way, provides the SOA enterprise architect with an awareness of optimization possibilities applicable to a Web service infrastructure. Consolidating the acceleration functions in an integrated appliance and controlling them via policies specified by WSDL annotations simplifies the implementation. Caching is a fundamental optimization technique found in all computer systems and networks. Modern CPU chips maintain instruction and data caches along with clever methods of ensuring coherency with the RAM that may be simultaneously accessed by other CPUs and I/O processors. In many respects, RAM can be thought of as a cache of your virtual memory swap fi... (more)

The Optimization Appliance

An efficient Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation distributes as much processing as possible to trusted appliances in the nearer tiers, where intelligent content-based routing decisions made by highly efficient processors can also perform caching, transformations, and other functions. This article will present a detailed example of a "Las Vegas Casino" that has been implemented as a set of distributed Web Services and provide a step-by-step guide for delivering these services. The implementation of this virtual casino extends from the farthest tier of the central da... (more)