Optimization of the Processing in a Middleware Environment for a Set of XML Variants

Abstract

The middleware has become an important product category since the 1990s, when companies started to adopt client-server architectures and had to deal with distributed computing problems. It employs the component based design to distribute the processing across the network. The middleware components use proprietary formats or more popularly XML for data exchange. There are different formats or variants of XML available which when used can improve the processing speed at a middleware component. However it is possible that the same format may not be suitable or be the best for all the components the XML goes through. Thus from a given set of XML variants or formats, there can be a particular XML format that will process faster as compared to others in a given middleware component. That same XML format however may not be suitable for other middleware components and some other format from the set might be.

In this thesis we consider the problem of improving the processing speed in the middleware, given a set of different XML formats. We propose the use of local optimization to achieve global optimization. We find the best suited XML format for each component. This is done with the help of a feedback based software monitoring system. The software collects data about the processing time taken in a particular component by different formats with the help of feedback from that component and then process that data to decide which format suits that component best. Once the formats are known, the data can be sent to the components in that format and it would result in faster processing in the system as a whole, as compared to, if a single format was used for all the components. We also numerically investigate the performance of a middleware environment with and without the feedback based software monitoring system.