• Definition of XML/SOAP webservices, and input of providers, clients and calls associated with these webservices.

• Definition of identification rules for webservice, client, call, request document and response document.

• Analysis of the incoming XML/SOAP document by generating index elements (those elements of the document that must be considered to establish the cache criteria), which uniquely identify a given document by creating a unique document identifier (IDU). The response is cached in the disk with its associated IDU.

• Up to 3 different criteria to expire cache documents: time to cache for calls, expiration rules and external events.

• Capable of balancing at both the server and port level.

• Capable of balancing at the webservice level: in other words, different sets of balancing servers may be defined for each webservice.

• Capable of rewriting the target url before redirecting it to the servers.

• Capable of balancing by cookie and by input document element.

• Load balancing rule used is call based round-robin.

• Features a graphic monitoring tool that shows which clients and calls are currently active in each load balancing server.

• VPFW can decide if a given request, not found in cache, should be sent to the webservice servers or not. There are 4 different criteria used to restrict the request's access to the webservice servers, and these restrictions can be applied at the webservice service (call) level or at the client level:

1. Access restriction by average simultaneous requests quota.
2. Access restriction by maximum simultaneous requests quota.
3. Access restriction by quota for nominal requests.
4. Access restriction by time zone.

• Capable of validating XML and SOAP documents using xsd schemas. The webservice servers delegate in VPFW the validation process of input documents, thus freeing them from this task.

• Capable of unencrypting the received secure client request and transforming it into an unsecure request before redirecting it to the webservice servers, thus freeing them from this task.

• Capable of encrypting received unsecure client request and transforming it into a secure request before redirecting it to the webservice servers, thus freeing the application from this task.

• Capable of returning the response to the client compressed if the accept-encoding header is present in the request, thus freeing the webservice servers from the compression process.
Gzip and deflate algorithms supported.

• Capable of requesting a compressed response from the webservice servers by modifying the accept-encoding request header. If the provider is capable of returning the response in the requested format (gzip and deflate algorithms are supported), VPFW automatically uncompresses the response before returning it to the client application, thus freeing it from the compression process.

Capable of tracing all incoming requests by generating 4 different log files:

1. System log: system events are registered (VPFW startup and shutdown details, the results of the running of a task, etc.)

2. Access log: in VPFW every request sent to the system by a client is registered.

3. Error log: errors generated by requests are registered, with information about the IP address that caused the error, interface and/or client and/or call where the error occurred, a description of the error (with optional information if any) and the request and/or response document that caused the error (if any).

4. Debug log: this is a log which can be activated from the administration of the interface. Once active, it registers a series of response times which correspond to the different processes that are executed within VPFW for each request.

Using the access log, detailed statistics are generated for all webservice activity: client access information, webservice call usage, server response time, incoming and outgoing data transfer volume, webservices-generated error analysis, etc.

• Within VPFW there are two webservice modes: server mode, which means that the webservice acts as a data provider for its clients, and client mode, which means that the webservice acts as a client that gets its data from a webservice provider.
With VPFW you may have as many webservices as you like in the mode which corresponds to each case.

• The deactivation of the VPFW server does not affect the operation of the client VPFW, and vice versa.

• VPFW is non-intrusive: it is installed within the client's infrastructure without the need to change code in existing applications.

• Quick and easy deployment: since existing applications do not need to be modified, you may activate a VPFW in a production environment the same day it is installed.

• Administration and configuration via web: VPFW comes with a powerful web tool that allows simple and intuitive administration and configuration of all of its components.

• Updates without service downtime: VPFW can be updated without stopping the client system.