Harvey Gunther

XSLT (eXtended Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a very powerful and flexible tool in the XML technology arsenal for transforming XML documents into HTML, plain text, or different XML representations. The use of XSLT in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) customer applications is burgeoning, despite the following problems: XSLT is difficult to learn and hard to master. XSLT is not an optimal performer, but its performance is improving rapidly. XSLT has little or no tooling for authoring HTML/XHTML pages. In this article I explore the reasons why some WAS applications use XSL for HTML production instead of JavaServer Pages (JSP). I will compare the performance of XSLT for HTML/XHTML production against JSPs and browser formatting. I will then provide guidance on how to improve XSLT performance in WAS should you decide to go this route. While this article focuses on... (more)

Performance Best Practices for Using WAS Web Services

Web services performance comes of age in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) version 5.0.2, but just as with more traditional J2EE applications, the performance of Web services applications is largely determined by the design of the application and the database. This article considers the application design factors unique to Web services performance, including the most important: moving to WAS 5.0.2. I will examine the performance of WAS 5.0.2 Web services and establish some best practices for optimizing Web services performance on WAS 5.0.2. Before discussing specific recommendat... (more)

Optimizing WebSphere 5.0 Performance

IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 5.0 introduces EJB 2.0 support, which offers new and important opportunities for application architects, such as EJB 2.0 local interfaces; container-managed relationships for EJB-modeled associations; message-driven beans; EJB home methods; EJB-select methods; an internal EJB finder; and EJB-QL, a standard way of defining EJB select and EJB finders. All of these are part of the J2EE EJB 2.0 Specification. To improve the performance of container-managed persistence entity beans WAS 5.0 offers two new tuning levers that reduce database latency... (more)