'XML traffic may soon increase 100,000-fold'

Andrew Nash, CTO of Reactivity, says the double whammy of AJAX and Office 2007 will be pumping an extraordinary amount of new XML traffic across enterprises.  I recently had the chance to talk with Nash about the challenge (interview posted here at Webservices.Org).

“It’s still early, but we’re seeing a huge amount of potential interest, and potentially having lots of client-side stuff now starting to generate XML traffic,” Nash said. “Whereas we were seeing a lot of the servers begin to communicate using XML previously, what’s happening here in the AJAX space is, we now have the 100,000-times multiplier of potentially user desktops all beginning to generate XML.” Ditto for Office 2007, which is scheduled for release early next year.

Nash says much of this traffic will be manageable through caching strategies that address any potential performance hits across enterprise systems. System overhead can be reduced by offloading processing and caching messages, particular portions dealing with schema validation, content, security, and inspection.

All this new XML flowing around isn't a bad thing, either, Nash points out. The rise of XML will create countless new opportunities for “lots of Web services, lots of potential openings, lots of back-end services, and lots of integration opportunities."