After days of big numbers and different kinds of lists, let's get technical today.
Here is the introduction of an article which appeared recently on Network World Fusion.
Traditional network accelerators speed network applications by moving content closer to users, as in the case of local or global caching, or by off-loading cryptographic functions from servers, as with Secure Sockets Layer accelerators.
However, the growing use of dynamic XML in applications is giving network administrators something new to worry about. XML is a verbose format that creates performance problems. This has spurred the emergence of a new type of network device: the XML accelerator.
XML accelerators off-load XML processing from application servers and Web servers. This is a dramatic departure from the past, given that XML processing traditionally has been considered to be the purview of the application, not the network infrastructure. The benefits of XML accelerators are faster response times and lower project costs.
There are many types of XML processing that can be performed at the network level -- the two most common are XML redirection and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).
I bet that some of you didn't know about a beast like XSLT. Before you start scratching your head, please read the full article.
And Network World Fusion is providing some help with a diagram, showing how XML accelerators work.
Source: Eugene Kuznetsov, Network World Fusion, June 10, 2002
6:08:56 PM Permalink
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