Web services are starting to become ubiquitous. Yet, despite their prevalence, web services are notoriously slow and do not inherently scale well. What happens when you need to build an XML service that needs to scale to thousands of transactions a second? And what if you have several thousand concurrent connections? And what do you do when you need to transform and route those requests on the fly?

One possible solution is to use an XML router which proxies and manages all your incoming requests. XML routers can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but a solution can be built with off-the-shelf hardware and open source software.

The open source projects Codehaus XFire and AsyncWeb make this type of solution possible through their high performance characteristics and support for non-blocking I/O connections. This talk will outline the challenges involved and how a solution can built.