The Pipeline

They've got the power

Barriers are made to be broken — at least that's probably what DataPower officials would say as they celebrate their latest distinction as the first to break the 1 terabyte barrier for Extensible Markup Language processing.

The company's new XA35 XML Accelerator network appliance accomplished this feat. The product delivers streaming capabilities to XML Path Language (XPath) and Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformation (XSLT) for XML documents of unlimited size. The former is a language for addressing parts of an XML document that works with the latter, which is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents.

The new streaming approach allows an XML engine to start producing output before the entire input has been parsed. That differs from the previous process in which the entire input had to be parsed before producing any output.

Streaming processing was possible only when using low-level custom programming or special-purpose languages. With the XA35 XML Accelerator, however, XML developers can continue using familiar standards.

The product requires only a constant amount of memory — regardless of the size of the XML document.

The appliance is powered by the company's compiler technology, DataPower XG4. This technology automatically determines which XML processing operations can be streamed and then processes them accordingly, saving users time.

The XA35 XML Accelerator is a member of DataPower's XML-aware networking product family.

Pearl in the shell

Imagine you're a thief who has just scored a government employee's notebook computer. You open it to pull out the hard drive and find ...nothing.

Instead of a notebook, you've stolen a thin client, which is just a shell with nothing on it: no software, no memory — not even a processor.

Tadpole Computer officials recently released such a thin client. The Comet 12 looks like an ultra-thin notebook, weighd less than 2.5 pounds and features a 12-inch display. But all the processing takes place on a remote server using the Sun Ray protocol from Sun Microsystems. The server can run Microsoft Windows, Linux or Unix.

The system features 802.11a/b/g wireless connectivity, and users can roam their sessions between other Comet or Sun Ray clients on the same network by reauthenticating on another server.

Users can authenticate with smart cards, passwords and biometric devices.

Comet 12 starts at $1,295.