Enterprises are increasingly turning to service oriented architectures (SOAs), both to exploit SOA's potential for eliminating redundancies and accelerating project delivery though the consolidation and reuse of Web services, and as a means of streamlining business processes among departments and organizations.
But there's a rub: Web services carry a big overhead because the data exchanged is formatted with XML tags. XML provides a structured way to add context to data so that it can be shared among different applications, but it's a wide load. Because it's text-based, it can take up between 30 and 50 times more bandwidth than other protocols.
There are plans afoot to trim XML's waistline, primarily the W3C's XML Binary Characterization Working Group's scheme for encoding XML docs in binary form--think of Binary XML as XML on Pilates. But we're not there yet.
Enter the XML appliance, a relatively new combination of hardware and software designed to crank up the speed of XML document processing and/or secure XML-based communications.
