Graham Glass

This article presents a technical comparison of Electric XML and JDOM, two popular Java libraries for manipulating XML. It compares and contrasts the designs of each library, with a discussion on how these choices impact performance and ease-of-use. Benchmarks for several common operations are provided. About six months ago my company needed to create a high-speed toolkit for parsing and manipulating XML as part of its GLUE platform for Web Services. We decided to release for free the resultant library, called Electric XML, with source, into the development community. Electric XML thus joined the fray of XML toolkits that promise to simplify the creation of XML applications. Over the last few months there have been lots of interesting technical discussions regarding the pros and cons of various design philosophies for creating XML toolkits, and I thought it would ... (more)

Web Services Made Easy

Web services are XML-based building blocks for assembling distributed systems. Now that it's everyone's favorite buzzword, many developers are interested in experimenting with the technology to see what the excitement is all about. The first generation of Web services platforms, such as Apache SOAP, was great for getting services up and running, but their ease of use and performance left a lot to be desired. The second generation of platforms is intuitive, fast, and can dramatically reduce the learning curve associated with Web services. This article describes one of these plat... (more)

Grid Computing and Web Services

Companies have long dreamed of assembling their enterprise systems from a collection of network building blocks. CORBA and DCOM, both early attempts at tackling this problem, never got very far in terms of adoption. But now that Web services have burst onto the scene, it looks like SOAP and WSDL will succeed in becoming the lingua franca for distributed computing, thereby providing the catalyst for a wholesale move toward service-oriented architectures (SOAs). An SOA implements each part of a system as a Web service. Simple Web services provide low-level features such as access ... (more)

Service-Oriented Architectures

While the short-term payoff of Web services technologies like SOAP and WSDL is faster, cheaper, simpler integration, I believe the long-term benefits will be more profound. Specifically, I think that Web services will catalyze a trend toward service-oriented architectures in which enterprises view their systems as an orchestrated web of services that extend beyond their firewalls into the systems of their partners and their customers. As I'll explain shortly, service-oriented architectures will require a new kind of distributed computing platform - in a sense, an operating syste... (more)