XML appliance
Encyclopedia
An XML appliance is a special purpose network device used to secure, manage and mediate XML
traffic. They are most popularly implemented in Service Oriented Architectures
to control XML based Web Services
traffic, and increasingly in cloud oriented computing
to help enterprises integrate on premise applications with off premise cloud hosted applications. XML Appliances are also commonly referred to as SOA Appliances, SOA Gateways, XML Gateways, Cloud Brokers. Some have also been deployed for more specific applications like Message-oriented middleware
. While the originators of the product category deployed exclusively as hardware, today most XML Appliances are also available as software gateways and virtual appliances for environments like VMWare
.
and Vordel in 1999, Sarvega
in 2000, Forum Systems in 2001 and Layer 7 Technologies in 2002. Early vendors like DataPower
focused on the XML acceleration problem which they solved through specialized hardware. While several vendors like DataPower and Layer 7 Technologies continue to offer hardware accelerated options for high performance situations, advances in computing speed has made software or vmware based "appliances" practical in many common customer situations. Early use cases for XML Appliances included banking and cross-agency government information sharing. Today XML Appliances are widely used across finance, telecommunications, government, energy, logistics commensurate with the growing usage of XML
as a cross-division and cross-company data exchange protocol.
In 2005, XML Appliances (or SOA Appliances as they came to be known) became increasingly associated with Service Oriented Architectures
and more specifically the problem of governing SOA. The governance of SOA comes down to the control of how applications delivered as "services" can be shared with or called by other applications. Appliances became a popular way of controlling or governing SOA because addressed message security, availability and translation of data so that an application can call another application irrespective of the data format and security policies. Governance of SOA became so critical that Gartner
, a leading technology analyst firm, published a dedicated Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets Magic Quadrant
on the topic that covered both SOA management and SOA appliances in March 2007 and most recently in March 2009.
In recent years as XML
has become a common way to expose data and application functionality over the Internet XML appliances or gateways have become common place in many integration scenarios.
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
traffic. They are most popularly implemented in Service Oriented Architectures
Service-oriented architecture
In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
to control XML based Web Services
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
traffic, and increasingly in cloud oriented computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
to help enterprises integrate on premise applications with off premise cloud hosted applications. XML Appliances are also commonly referred to as SOA Appliances, SOA Gateways, XML Gateways, Cloud Brokers. Some have also been deployed for more specific applications like Message-oriented middleware
Message-oriented middleware
Message-oriented middleware is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple...
. While the originators of the product category deployed exclusively as hardware, today most XML Appliances are also available as software gateways and virtual appliances for environments like VMWare
VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
.
History of XML appliances
The first XML Appliances were created by DataPowerDataPower
DataPower is a product division within IBM that produces XML appliances for processing XML messages as well as any-to-any legacy message transformation...
and Vordel in 1999, Sarvega
Sarvega
Sarvega was an Intel-owned company that provided XML appliances. The Intel purchase was announced on Aug. 17th, 2005.The division is now known as Intel SOA Products Division and is part of the Software and Services Group...
in 2000, Forum Systems in 2001 and Layer 7 Technologies in 2002. Early vendors like DataPower
DataPower
DataPower is a product division within IBM that produces XML appliances for processing XML messages as well as any-to-any legacy message transformation...
focused on the XML acceleration problem which they solved through specialized hardware. While several vendors like DataPower and Layer 7 Technologies continue to offer hardware accelerated options for high performance situations, advances in computing speed has made software or vmware based "appliances" practical in many common customer situations. Early use cases for XML Appliances included banking and cross-agency government information sharing. Today XML Appliances are widely used across finance, telecommunications, government, energy, logistics commensurate with the growing usage of XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
as a cross-division and cross-company data exchange protocol.
In 2005, XML Appliances (or SOA Appliances as they came to be known) became increasingly associated with Service Oriented Architectures
Service-oriented architecture
In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
and more specifically the problem of governing SOA. The governance of SOA comes down to the control of how applications delivered as "services" can be shared with or called by other applications. Appliances became a popular way of controlling or governing SOA because addressed message security, availability and translation of data so that an application can call another application irrespective of the data format and security policies. Governance of SOA became so critical that Gartner
Gartner
Gartner, Inc. is an information technology research and advisory firm headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, United States. It was known as GartnerGroup until 2001....
, a leading technology analyst firm, published a dedicated Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets Magic Quadrant
Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a proprietary research tool developed by Gartner Inc., a US based research and advisory firm. According to Gartner, the Magic Quadrant aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants, thus possibly enabling a company...
on the topic that covered both SOA management and SOA appliances in March 2007 and most recently in March 2009.
In recent years as XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
has become a common way to expose data and application functionality over the Internet XML appliances or gateways have become common place in many integration scenarios.
Use Cases of XML appliances
- High speed transformation and processing of XML traffic
- Security and Governance of Service Oriented ArchitecturesService-oriented architectureIn software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
or SOA - Control of Web application API'sApplication programming interfaceAn application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
that are commonly today exposed as XML based RESTRepresentational State TransferRepresentational state transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation...
interfaces - integration of enterprise applications to services hosted in the cloud
- Data routing and transformation
- Filtering
Common features of XML appliances
- They can parse, validate, transform and route XML messages via XPathXPathXPath is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values from the content of an XML document...
and XSLTXSLTXSLT is a declarative, XML-based language used for the transformation of XML documents. The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. The new document may be serialized by the processor in standard XML syntax or in another format,... - They can control access to applications that expose data and functionality through XML APIs
- They can control SLAs for how XML based services get shared with other applications
- They can track XML traffic and usage of specific application services exposes through XML interfaces
Classification of XML appliances
Although the term XML appliance is the most general term to describe these devices, most vendors use alternative terminology that describe more specific functionality of these devices. The following are alternative names used for XML Appliances:- XML accelerators — are devices that typically use custom hardware or software built on standards-based hardware to accelerate XPathXPathXPath is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values from the content of an XML document...
processing. This hardware typically provides a performance boost between 10 and 100 times in the number of messages per second that can be processed. - Integration applianceIntegration applianceAn integration appliance is a computer system specifically designed to lower the cost of integrating computer systems. Most integration appliances send or receive electronic messages from other computers that are exchanging electronic documents...
— (also known as application routers) are devices that are designed to make the integration of computer systems easier. - XML firewallXML firewallAn XML firewall is a specialized device used to protect applications exposed through XML based interfaces like WSDL and REST and scan XML traffic coming in and out of an organization...
s are classes of XML appliances focused on identity and message security. They typically implement WS-SecurityWS-SecurityWS-Security is a flexible and feature-rich extension to SOAP to apply security to web services. It is a member of the WS-* family of web service specifications and was published by OASIS....
message standards along with standards like SAML, WS-I BSP, WS-Policy and so forth. - Message-oriented middlewareMessage-oriented middlewareMessage-oriented middleware is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple...
appliances - are hardware devices supporting the sending and receiving of messages between distributed systems. - SOA Gateways are commonly used to govern SOA traffic.
- API proxy are commonly used to manage Web API's.
- Cloud Brokers or Gateways are commonly used to integrate enterprise applications with cloud services.
Notable XML appliance vendors
- Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) (end-of-life)
- IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA AppliancesIBM WebSphere DataPower SOA AppliancesIBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances is a family of purpose-built, easy-to-deploy network devices that simplify, help secure, and accelerate XML and Web Services deployments while extending SOA infrastructure...
- Intel SOA Expressway
- Forum Systems
- Layer 7 Technologies
- Solace Systems
- Vordel
- ITAC WS-Guardian
See also
- XMLXMLExtensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
- XSLTXSLTXSLT is a declarative, XML-based language used for the transformation of XML documents. The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. The new document may be serialized by the processor in standard XML syntax or in another format,...
- SOAPSOAPSOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...
- XML Enabled NetworkingXML Enabled NetworkingXML Enabled Networking provides an abstraction layer that exists alongside the traditional Internet Protocol network. This layer addresses the security, incompatibility and latency issues encumbering XML messages, web services and service oriented architectures .-History of XML Enabled...
- WS-SecurityWS-SecurityWS-Security is a flexible and feature-rich extension to SOAP to apply security to web services. It is a member of the WS-* family of web service specifications and was published by OASIS....
- Apache AxisApache AxisApache Axis is an open source, XML based Web service framework. It consists of a Java and a C++ implementation of the SOAP server, and various utilities and APIs for generating and deploying Web service applications. Using Apache Axis, developers can create interoperable, distributed computing...
- Integration applianceIntegration applianceAn integration appliance is a computer system specifically designed to lower the cost of integrating computer systems. Most integration appliances send or receive electronic messages from other computers that are exchanging electronic documents...
- Message-oriented middlewareMessage-oriented middlewareMessage-oriented middleware is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple...