XML Processing Tier Decisions

A distributed or Internet application will be successful only if it can scale to meet its peak demands. In the case of XML-enabled applications and services, this cannot be guaranteed by simply throwing more and more hardware into the deployment. Instead, you need to intelligently design the system to perform XML processing on appropriate tiers and you need to choose the right type of processing.

First you need to realize that XML moving between tiers can require up to ten times the bandwidth of binary data. Interoperability comes at a cost because metadata is included along with the data. In many data-interchange applications, the metadata, element, and attribute names may be an order of magnitude greater than the data being conveyed. This is a current issue, as evidenced by the fact that two major analyst groups, Forester Research and Burton Group, both have warned enterprises to consider how XML traffic will likely affect their networks. Even Cisco reports that interest is growing in higher-throughput network products due to increasing XML traffic. What does this mean for your distributed applications?