Intel® Software Network

SOA Expressway provides the following features and benefits:

Feature	Benefits
Service Mediation Engine (Details)	Scalable service orchestration optimized for Intel Multi-Core Reduce costs for scaling SOA across domains Provide efficient service delivery, enablement and virtualization Create powerful, high performing business-level service orchestrations
SOA Message Acceleration (Details)	Reduce capital costs for purpose built XML appliances Simplify SOA by removing the need for additional hardware-based appliances
Software Appliance (Details)	Flexibly deploy domain-wide SOA optimized for Intel® Multi-Core Easy appliance management in a software form-factor Reduce capital costs for high-cost XML appliances purely for development and test purposes Available as a virtual appliance to make more efficient use of computing resources
Codeless Design and Development (Details)	Visual design environment eliminates the need to write code Design, deploy and test workflows directly from a visual environment Reduces the need for development resources in the Enterprise
Content Conversion (Details)	Create workflows for SOA enablement that involve non-XML, non-SOAP payloads Service enable legacy or proprietary applications Support business mediations that involve unstructured or semi-structured non-text binary formats
Platform Extensibility (Details)	Extensible for additional business processing Capable of supporting legacy protocols for mainframe service enablement Supports runtime governance of SOA through management extensions
Comprehensive Protocol Brokering (Details)	Create domain wide SOA applications that span different integration buses and protocols Perform business mediations across a variety of standard and non-standard integration protocols, including custom protocols
Security Gateway (Details)	Support for message level security (WS-Security) and transport level security (SSL) and AAA functions Centralized Security Policy Management Support for common perimeter security functions Credential Mapping for common message level security use cases

Service Mediation Engine — Intel® SOA Expressway includes a high-performance service mediation engine that interprets service based workflows in byte code form for processing SOAP, POX/REST, and even binary messages. This engine binds to the Intel XML core optimization layer that is optimized for Intel® multi-core architecture to accelerate XML processing including XPath, schema validation, and transformation operations.


SOA Message Acceleration — SOA Expressway contains native support for XML acceleration through the use of an efficient binary representation. It achieves wire speed in executing XML operations such as XPath node selection, XSLT, schema validation, constraint checking, content routing, and XML security (including canonicalization. Further, the Service mediation engine and XML technology is engineered to scale with Intel® multi-core architecture providing it the full benefit of Moore’s Law.


Software Appliance — SOA Expressway is available as a soft appliance, which is a software solution that runs on a standard operating system, but are managed like an appliance. This means that SOA Expressway can be managed through a Web Interface, complete with alarms, alerts, a dashboard and self-healing, self-correcting capabilities. SOA Expressway can also integrate with management consoles that support SNMP and JMX. Finally, because SOA Expressway is software solution, not hardware, it can be packaged into a virtual appliance and run on popular platforms such as VMWare, Xen and Microsoft Virtual Server.


Codeless Design and Development — SOA Expressway includes Intel® Services Designer, an Eclipse based application design environment for modeling service mediation and orchestration. It offers a policy-based modeling approach with a drag-and-drop interface thus removing the need of low level coding, further reducing development time. Service Designer allows the SOA architect to design, develop, test and ultimately deploy applications to a single SOA Expressway or a cluster of SOA Expressway instances.


Content Conversion — SOA Expressway includes a powerful engine for handling non-XML formats such as HL7, EDI, COBOL Copybook, NCPDP and HIPAA formats. SOA Expressway provides processing capability for a wide variety of unstructured, semi-structured, and fully structured text and binary formats for legacy data integration and conversion.


Platform Extensibility — Unlike hardware appliances, SOA Expressway is extensible and can execute custom services in Axis 2 and JBI containers. It therefore, provides the ability to both extend and accelerate existing SOA deployments without always requiring another hardware device.


Comprehensive Protocol Brokering — SOA Expressway provides protocol brokering for a wide variety of transports including HTTP, HTTP(s), JMS, raw TCP, File, FTP, and MLLP protocols.


Security Gateway — SOA Expressway supports XML/WS-Security, X.509 Tokens, HTTP Basic Authentication, Username/Password Tokens, X.509 path validation and CRL support. It has full support for SSL/TLS origination and termination as well as support for an optional cryptographic accelerator for digital signature, encryption and security token processing. It also offers XML perimeter defense capabilities such as service virtualization, XML limit checking, schema validation, XPath filtering and Denial of Service protection.