Head Scratcher

I wish I was on board at the very beginning of the project I'm working on. Maybe it would shed some light on the direction the client is currently taking.

This project is a rewrite of an existing, poorly performing, data processing system. The rewrite is being done in two parts. Phase 1 replaces the front half of the system - responsible for receiving messages, routing the transactions to the appropriate business logic, then finally, transmitting a response. Analysis (performed before I got here) identified this logic as the application bottleneck. This portion of the application was rewritten in JCAPS and it's currently being tested (I haven't seen any performance data for the rewrite yet).

The second phase of the project replaces the business logic, currently written in C++, with BPEL. Let me say that again... the second phase of this project replaces compiled C++ with interpreted XML. For speed.

Anyone else confused?

Now maybe implementing the business logic in BPEL will make future enhancements to the business logic easier, and that's the reason for choosing BPEL. Maybe. But at what cost to the performance of the system? My gut tells me that BPEL is going to be a dog. I hope not. I haven't been able to locate any BPEL benchmarks and how it compares with Java or C++.

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