Project Overview

Overview

It is generally believed that certain architectural elements in our Web Services Infrastructure contribute to the overhead in calling a component. Some of these architectural elements are:

• Authentication and Encryption requirements – this one has the biggest impact today
• Transformation between XML document and JAVA objects
• Building and parsing XML documents
• Component architecture – components doing more than what they should be doing
• Etc.

Often this results in poor performance for the application calling the component. This project will investigate these overheads from the following aspects:

• Where we are – what are these overheads and how much time is consumed in them for a typical application-component interaction
• Where we want to be – expectations of response times from the application perspective
• What can be done to get there and how

The project was sponsored by Enterprise Application Architecture (EAA) team.

In-Scope

• All architectural elements that comprise the Web Services environment are in scope.
• Identification of additional technologies / architectural styles that may need to be investigated leading to further improvements within the services infrastructure.
• Application-Component interaction scenarios

Out-of-Scope

• Implementation of the recommendations
• Investigation of new technologies / architecture styles that might be recommended as part of this charter

Sample Deliverables

• Compilation of the various architectural elements and their role in the application-component interaction
• Documenting the performance metrics for various application-component interaction scenarios.
• Documenting the user expectations and steps needed to meet those expectations.
• Recommendations on things to look at in the future (service composition, service modeling, etc.)