I am pleased to announce the General Availability of HydraSDO for XML 2.2. As the product matures and gains more widespread use, some important use cases are emerging: 

Parsing Very Large XML Documents - The industry trend of increasing large XML documents has resulted in unexpected problems with applications slowing down due to slow parsing times and increased memory usage. HydraSDO for XML includes an XML parser that has been designed to quickly parse very large XML documents, which provides an immediate boost in application performance. Using very large XML documents to share data between applications is sometimes referred to as Very Large Messaging - VLM. As a rough guide, an XML document is considered large when it is over 10 MB and very large when it is over 100 MB. The XML schema complexity is also, of course, an important factor. The problem with most XML parsers is that, unlike HydraSDO for XML, they do not scale linearly.

Efficient XML Parser Memory Usage - One of the special characteristics of the XML parser that is shipped with HydraSDO for XML is that is optimized for low memory usage. This can provide an immediate performance enhancement for some applications as well as generally reducing hardware resource requirements. In extreme cases, for very large XML documents, it can prevent applications from crashing due to the unexpectedly excessive memory usage during parsing.  As a rough guide, depending on the XML document complexity, HydraSDO for XML uses about half the memory of a typical parser.

Standardized Access for Custom Data Formats - Writing data access code for custom data formats can be time consuming and can require specialist knowledge and skills. The HydraSDO SDK can be used with HydraSDO for XML to develop the necessary custom DAS for reading and writing custom data. Providing the single, standard SDO API in both Java and C++ for disparate custom data formats saves development time and costs.   

SDO DataObject Streaming - With HydraSDO for XML, you only have to parse an XML document once to take advantage of the ability to stream the SDO DataObject between computers. Using this capability, you remove the need to parse the document repeatedly while maintaining the same simple XPath-based API to work with the data (this feature is called Distributed SDO).  

Sharing Data Between Java and C++ Applications -  HydraSDO for XML uses the SDO DataObject to efficiently share data in memory between Java and C++ applications. Depending on the nature of the shared data, the feature works well for tightly coupled applications where it significantly reduces the memory footprint compared with other methods such as SOAP or CORBA (this feature is called Shared Memory Access - SMA).

Vertical Industry XML Document Handling - the internal HydraSDO for XML test suite includes a wide range of standard industry XML documents, particularly financial services. The test suite is exceptionally extensive because Rogue Wave Software has a long history of providing high performance XML parsers aimed at enterprise developers with requirements for support for specific industry XML formats.  

Service Data Objects (SDO) Standard - SDO is the industry standard for data access in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The SDO standard provides access to disparate data formats through the common SDO API, which is available in both Java and C++.  SDO is the data access standard for Service Component Architecture.

HydraSDO for XML 2.2 is available for download at the Download Center.

I’m very pleased to announce the General Availability of SourcePro Edition 10, a very special event for Rogue Wave Software.

SourcePro is our flagship product and the main reason why we can claim to be the market leader in enterprise C++. We are launching the tenth version of SourcePro - a significant milestone that very few application development products reach. It’s a testament to the quality of the product and a demonstration of Rogue Wave’s long term commitment to the product, especially given the recent market trends moving in favor of C++  - most notably, new language standards coming in C++0X and giving C++ the same status as Java in new SOA industry standards such as SCA and SDO.

The full GA version of the product is available for customers now and the evaluation version will be available on our Web site in February.

John Markoff of The New York Times published an interesting article on today entitled  “Faster Chips Are Leaving Programmers in Their Dust“.

It’s great to see that this challenge, which I’ve been calling the Multi-core Dilemma is now moving into the mainstream discussion. Of course, I was far from the first to sound the alarm here, but it’s good to see the broader discussion now taking place.  We need to be talking about these issues and delivering practical solutions.  For everyone who writes software, this is a significant challenge but also a significant opportunity.  The approach to addressing this is “concurrent computing” or simply, “Concurrency”.  

Concurrency is a discipline that will become increasingly important in software development.  In fact, expect it to be a skill that employers look for on technical resumes in the not-too-distant future. Of course, Concurrency is not new, it’s almost as old as computing itself.  But as Herb Sutter pointed out in this article in Dr. Dobbs; “The Free Lunch Is Over“, it was only required for a relatively small percentage of applications until recently.  With multi-core and many-core hardware now a reality, Concurrency is already required for a significant percentage of applications and will soon be the norm.  

As cited in the Times article, several companies, including Microsoft, are working on new programming languages that are designed from the ground-up for Concurrency.  That is undoubtedly the right direction, but these efforts are years from being mainstream technology.  When they are ready, they are likely to be applicable mostly to new development - new code will be concurrent from the start.  But where does this leave the billions (yes, billions with a “B”) of lines of code that businesses already have running in their data centers?

There are a variety of threading packages available, including Rogue Wave’s SourcePro Threads for building concurrent applications. These tools make the process easier by handling much of the threading work so that software developers don’t have to. But even with these it is complex and there is still a lot of design and testing work to be done. Testing multi-threaded applications is tricky. Even with thorough testing, problems often don’t arise until the application is in production.There are many factors to consider in the Concurrency discussion, but here is one aspect to consider. With the widening adoption of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), we need to address Concurrency at the inter-service level as well as intra-service. Threading libraries and packages are well established approaches for intra-service, but there aren’t a lot of good solutions for inter-service Concurrency other than things like clusters - but that is a blunt instrument for this task.

Concurrency at the service level (inter-service) can have several benefits.First, this approach has the affect of abstracting the Concurrency model away from the application logic. This “loose coupling of concurrency” makes it easier to change your concurrency model - such as when you move from a 4-core to a 16-core server - without touching your application code. Second, it is easier to apply to existing applications since it treats the individual service largely as a black box. Third, it can provide the scale-out that traditionally came from clustering but with much more intelligence, since the application logic is part of the mix.

In summary, there are several important needs here that have not been adequately addressed:
1. Solutions that apply Concurrency to existing applications without significant rewriting
2. Inter-service Concurrency to abstract the Concurrency model from the application code

More on this later…

The new SourcePro release scheduled for launch next week includes the Apache C++ Standard Library (stdcxx), which has recently been promoted to Top Level Project status by the Apache Software Foundation after over two years in incubation (you can read the project history here). Rogue Wave Software is the primary sponsor of this project, which is based on our own standard library. There are many companies with products that have been opened, but few ever achieve the status of being an Apache project. It takes a lot of work to get a project out of incubation and to the status of being a full Apache project.

It’s a big achievement and the primary driver from Rogue Wave Software has been Martin Sebor - congratulations, Martin!