A little-known startup on Monday will try to make a big impression on Web services developers with a performance optimization tool that can eliminate much of the overhead associated with Web services transactions.
Chutney Technologies Inc. will introduce its Chutney Apptimizer for SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), designed to eliminate much of the processing overhead associated with executing SOAP-based Web services transactions.
As enterprises begin to develop Web services applications based on SOAP and XML, they are finding that the standards exact a heavy toll in processing and I/O requirements for both the Web services provider and consumer. Each transaction requires that a request and response be wrapped into a SOAP message, then the request and response must be extracted, and multiple SOAP messages are exchanged over a network.
Chutney Apptimizer for SOAP reduces much of the overhead using a storage engine or cache locally attached as shared storage to a Web server cluster and a patent-pending mechanism to directly serve the output of Web services calls from the cache. The processing, I/O functions and network exchanges are bypassed for each Web service call that is made.
“If you use Chutney when you are about to initiate the workflow, Chutney can return the application object and eliminate all the work required to satisfy the request,” explained Anindya Datta, president and CEO of the privately held startup in Atlanta.
The software uses functions provided in the service libraries of Apache SOAP and the Microsoft SOAP toolkit. “Weve created extensions on top of those, so you just have to drop in our extensions to the regular SOAP libraries and they are Chutney enabled. There is no need to touch your application code,” said Datta.
Chutneys first tool to provide application optimization requires developers to work with its application program interfaces at development time to perform application-layer caching for application servers and programming languages such as BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Sun ONE, Broadvision, Java, Microsoft .NET and C/C++.
Chutney will demonstrate Chutney Apptimizer for SOAP at NetWorld+Interop next month, and it will be available in early June. The storage engine is $100,000 for single instance or $150,000 for a high availability option. The software library is $5,000 per CPU.