Web Services-Ready

Significant numbers of Web-based applications now rely on XML as the primary medium for communication. The extensibility of XML is well-suited to application-to-application communication methods such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) employed in Web Services such as J2EE, .NET and Mono. As business logic is often embedded within the XML language, ZXTM allows you to parse the XML payload of requests using the XPath query language and make informed routing decisions on a basis of that business logic.

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How can ZXTM allow me to manage XML traffic better? 

The structure of XML data means that regular expressions cannot be used to make accurate selections from content. It also means that the information to be matched can be located anywhere - even in the last few bytes of a large request or document. Thankfully, the open standard XPath query language addresses both these issues, though current traffic management solutions lack both the abilities to use XPath and to match on data streams of any length. ZXTM allows you to analyse the entire incoming XML request, and TrafficScript can make native XPath queries to allow you to integrate much more tightly with your J2EE, .NET or Mono Web Services deployments.

Can you give me an example of an XPath query? 

Imagine that a significant proportion of your company's revenue came from online purchases. You know that your server cluster can only process a certain number of transactions per second and that increasing the size of the cluster is not a viable short-term option. Whilst this is ordinarily not a problem, during peak periods it becomes more important to prioritize higher-value purchases to ensure that a single high-value transaction is not "crowded out" by several smaller ones.

The XPath querying in TrafficScript allows ZXTM to sum the contents of a submitted shopping basket in a single, simple rule and if the total value is greater than a configured threshold, to send the purchase request to a set of servers dedicated to large orders. Given that the multiple pricing elements of the XML document could appear at any point in the data, the ability to parse the entire request as a whole is key.

Can I offload XSLT processing to ZXTM? 

Yes. In much the same way as you can increase the ROI on application servers by offloading SSL processing to a machine optimized for the task, you can achieve the same increase in performance by offloading XSLT processing to ZXTM. More information on XSLT offload is available.

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