LEIF

Create High-Performance SOA Applications Using Rogue Wave® LEIF

Rogue Wave LEIF is a SOA framework for developing service-based applications. It enables developers to tap into their existing applications and systems to create new, service-oriented applications while reaping the benefits of superior performance.

LEIF provides a complete framework for building and hosting services by including:

Extensive native-code, cross-platform networking foundation
• A robust container for hosting C++ Web services and Servlet servers
• Automatic generation of C++ server skeletons built to run inside the LEIF container
• Automatic generation of Web service clients from WSDL
• Easy-to-use XML-to-C++ data binding utility
• Pluggable transport supports Websphere® MQ and Tibco Rendezvous^tm

Figure 1: The LEIF Approach

How LEIF Works

Message formats in LEIF are based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a widely accepted, easy-to-use mechanism for transferring messages over a network. As shown in Figure 1, to use LEIF, developers supply a standard Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file and LEIF automatically generates a skeleton service that handles the details of protocols, standards and networking to ensure interoperability. Developers then drop in new or existing C++ business logic to create a ready-to-deploy service.

LEIF allows developers to incorporate new standards or integration requirements without disrupting the rest of the application - the business logic is completely isolated from the service infrastructure. This functionality enables developers to regenerate the skeleton service without changing the custom business logic.

Designed with Performance in Mind

LEIF is designed from the ground up to maximize performance wherever possible and directly addresses the performance bottleneck between services. LEIF leverages Rogue Wave® developers・years of experience producing easy-to-use frameworks that abstract away the details of networking, XML parsing and streaming data between different platforms.

In addition, all LEIF code is written in native C++ language to maximize performance. XML parsing is a very intensive task as it involves many memory resizing operations and rapid navigation of the document. This is an area where native code excels compared to Java and other platforms and where our extensive experience optimizing C++ code pays off. Moreover, LEIF is built on our world-renowned SourcePro® C++, which has been proven in thousands of real-world applications with stringent performance and throughput requirements.

What'New - LEIF 2.5

Key enhancements in LEIF 2.5 include:

	Update	Detail
New	Direct access to XML element in original format	Specific elements or types within a schema file can be left in raw XML format, allowing access to non-conformant or changing documents
New	Support for MIME attachments in SOAP messages	Implementation according to WS-I Attachments Profile
New	Support for XML Schema constructs: key/keyref abstract redefine
Enhanced	SOAP "wrapped style" messages now fully supported
Enhanced	Code generation speed improved 2-200 times

In addition to these enhancements, LEIF 2.5 adds support for Sun Solaris 10 x86 for AMD (32 and 64 bit)/ Sun Studio 10 compiler.