RIA and Web Services
As you all know Rich Internet Applications (RIA) like MyUniPortal are being mentioned more in articles and blogs all over the world. In order to provide dynamic content from multiple sources Web Services are proving to be a great resource for content. MyUniPortal initally used Axis and currently uses JAX-WS for it’s Web Services and has used it since it was known as Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP) from version 1.6 onward. The reason for that is JAXWS has provided the best performance for web services and is supported by JRE 1.6 which MyUniPortal uses on both the client and server side along with JBoss. Also, web service implementation with AOP on the server side is much easier compared to the early days of Axis and JWSDP. JAXWS is currently at version 2.1 EA 3 and I use it on the server side of MyUniportal with JBoss and remain with JAX-WS 2.0 on the client side to reduce the number of Java Archives (jars) and total download size of MyUniPortal. Currently for small requests/responses from the MyUniPortal Web Service it takes under 6milliseconds for transaction response time measured at the client and I have measured under 60milliseconds round trip time months ago when away on business in Minnesota where the physical location of the server was here in Idaho. When I ran the tests I was using a Dual Core Centrino laptop with the MyUniPortal RIA as the client downloadable via Java Web Start and the server is Windows 32-bit running on a simple P3 3.0Ghz DDR2 800 2GB of Memory. That was several months ago and I have upgraded the server to a AMD64 X2 4200+ processor with 1GB of DDR2 800 but have not made measurements yet but hopefully soon in 64-bit mode. Hope that helps the blog readers out there.