Are Web services too slow for financial exchanges, which must operate at real-time, breakneck speeds?
The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), the world's largest physical commodities future exchange, has implemented service-oriented architecture to handle a massive messaging increase resulting from the transition from floor trading to side-by-side electronic trading and the launch of the Dubai Mercantile Exchange. As reported by Rich Seeley in SearchWebServices, the exchange's new implementation will support "massive volumes of orders, price prints and trades including up to 1.2 million contracts per day, a 38% increase in volume, and process more than 50,000 messages per second, a tenfold increase over the former implementation."
The project was built without Web services. Rather, it was deployed using Java Messaging Service (JMS) standards.
Hub Vandervoort, CTO of the Enterprise Infrastructure Division at Progress Software, which helped NYMEX implement the SOA, explains: "It most definitely is an SOA. Web services are not used at all. With most financial services firms, especially in the front office trading environment and especially as it relates to exchanges, you simply can't meet their performance objectives with the WS-standards today. HTTP SOAP just isn't reliable enough nor does it have the performance for the kind of traffic we're talking about here."
More proof positive that SOA is about services of all kinds, not necessarily just Web services. While Web services are clearly the least path of resistance to SOA -- and most SOA projects are built on Web services -- SOA does not depend on Web services alone. Many organizations have a hodgepodge of formats and infrastructure types that date back years, and for SOA to succeed, it needs to be standards-agnostic.
After all, isn't that what SOA is all about?
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