Benefits of using XML Accelerators

Question

What are XML Accelerators and how do they work?

Is anyone using them in a production environment for systems that performs heavy XML processing? If yes, then how have you benefited in using them?

Answer 1

You're potentially approaching a problem from the wrong angle. Do you have a desire to increase performance of some system? If so then by all means performance analyse the system to highlight where the bottlenecks are. Unless you've already been through this process several times then I'd be surprised if XML processing is currently your #1 bottleneck.

Answer 2

Generally they implement in dedicated hardware XML services, including:

• validation (DTD or XSD)
• transformation (XSLT)
• parsing (in particular, for SOAP messages)

Knowing the XML coming into your software is already clean and in your canonical format can often make a large difference in performance.

Some companies that do this are

• Layer 7
• DataPower who was bought by IBM

Some companies, however, believe that properly optimized software is sufficient. See for example

• Actional

And others have gone down the "soft appliance" route, such as Intel with its purchase here

• Sarvega - bought out by Intel

Personally, I think that properly implemented software doesn't need acceleration. Parsers, transformation engines, and validators have come a long way in the last couple of years. Witness Xerces C++, DataDirect XQuery, Saxon 9.1 and MarkLogic's MarkMail application as examples.