The new http/s transport to be available with Synapse 1.0..

The Synapse team has been getting ready for the 1.0 release in the past couple of weeks, and one of the core features being introduced is a non-blocking http/s transport over the Apache HttpCore library and its NIO extensions.

I would be conducting official performance benchmarks on this transport in the coming weeks as soon as I get access to one more test machine to be used as the load generator that has already been ordered. I have altered the benchmark code that came with the HttpCore 'contrib', to add multithreaded support, so that it behaves almost as equal to or better than ApacheBench (ab) in some cases! Yes, this piece of Java code is able to properly handle keepalive requests when http 1.1 chunking is being used, and thus is able to perform better than ab for scenarios where it is useful.

The Synapse https transport supports two way authentication and hostname verification, and is based on the same NIO code base. However, it requires a J2SE 1.5 runtime as the SSLEngine class used to manage SSL sessions is not available with previous JDKs.

So be ready to learn more about Synapse in the coming weeks as we release our 1.0 distribution shortly!