Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Business Object Parsing Modes

A new business object framework runtime is provided in version WebSphere Version 7, which is built on a new high speed XML infrastructure that enables optimized XML processing and enhanced XML fidelity.

The following should be taken into account when choosing the parsing mode:

- A module can be configured to run in one parsing mode.

- Modules that were created in a version of IID prior to version 7 will run in the eager parsing mode without any changes required.

- By default, modules and libraries that are created in IID version 7 and later versions will be given the most suitable parsing mode depending on the parsing mode of

- existing projects in the workspace
- dependent projects in the workspace
- other projects in the same solution

- For better performance, avoid using mixed mode (eager, lazy) for application modules that frequently interact with each other.

- The interaction between modules with diff erent parsing modes takes place through serialization and deserialization, which can negatively affect performance.

- If using a mixed mode is unavoidable, starting an application from an eager parsing module to a lazy parsing module is more efficient than the other way around.

The WebSphere runtime uses the RMI/IIOP for the synchronous  invocations.

Assuming we have the following scenario:

SCA synchronous intermodule communication (two servers)

where the SCA messages are passed by value across different servers using RMI/IIOP. The SCA messages are transferred from one SCA at runtime to the SCA runtime on the second server by using the RMI/IIOP protocol.

In this case there is a slowdown in speed due to the serialization and deserialization of the data between the two servers. A slowdown is introduced also if the parsing modes of the two modules are different, as show below:

An attractive alternative solution for these kind of invocations (intermodule between two different clusters) could be the following:

where the SCA cross JVM invocation has been replaced by a Web Service binding invocation.

(Note that the module M1A acts as a static single access point for multiple consumers that want access to the services provided by the Cluster B modules.)

By bench marking the above solutions (40 parallel requests every 2 seconds) with the same sample XML (~3KB) we show that the average response time for the second scenario (Web Services) was 171 msec, whereas for the first scenario (SCA) the average response time was 260 msec.

References

[1] IBM Information Center- “Consideration when choosing the business object parsing mode"  Date of access: October 2014. http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/#!/SSFPJS_7.5.1/com.ibm.wbpm.main.doc/bo/topics/rboparse.html