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An XML appliance is a separate computer system with deliberately narrow functionality that exchanges XML messages with other computer systems. XML appliances secure, accelerate and route XML so enterprises can cost-effectively realize its full potential for messaging and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). They are designed specifically to be easy to install, configure and manage. While some XML appliances must rely on specialized hardware and software to accelerate the processing of XML messages, others accomplish the same tasks using standards-based hardware and operating systems.
History of XML appliances The first XML appliances were created by DataPower in 1999, but there were generally two groups of engineers - some who were focused on large volumes of XML transformations and some who were focused on high-speed XML processing and security. The transformation team created specialized software or Application-specific integrated circuits that performed transformations up to 100 times faster than basic software-only solutions. Although there were some early adopters of these systems, it was initially restricted to large e-commerce sites such as Yahoo! and Amazon. The XML processing team created highly optimized appliances that secured and integrated XML across many use cases. Early entrants in XML appliances include vendors such as DataPower (now owned by IBM), Reactivity, Inc., Layer 7 Technologies,Vordel, and Sarvega (now owned by Intel). These two approaches began to converge when a second generation of XML appliances started to appear around 2003, when these devices were used to exchange SOAP XML messages between computers on public networks. These messages required advanced security features such as encryption, digital signatures and denial of service attack prevention. Because the setup and configuration of software-only systems was time consuming, companies could save a great deal of money by using appliances that were pre-packaged with WS-Security standards built in. Common features of XML appliances 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 appliance vendors See also | ||||||||
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