Performance benefits of HTTP/2

The HTTP/2 protocol brings in a lot of benefits in terms of performance for modern web applications. To understand what benefits HTTP/2 brings, it is important to understand the limitations of HTTP/1.1  protocol.

The HTTP protocol only allows one 'outstanding' request per TCP connection - i.e. if a page is downloading 100 assets, only one request can be made per TCP connection. Browsers typically open 4-8 TCP connections per page to load the page faster (parallel requests), but this results in network congestion.

The HTTP/2 protocol is fully multiplexed - i.e. it allows multiple parallel requests/responses on the same TCP connection. It also compresses HTTP headers (reduce payload size) and is a binary protocol (not textual). The protocol also allows servers to proactively push responses directly to the browsers cache, thus avoiding HTTP requests.

The following links give an excellent explanation of the HTTP/2 protocol and its benefits.
https://http2.github.io/faq/
https://bagder.gitbooks.io/http2-explained/en/

The following site shows the performance of HTTP/2 compared to HTTP/1.1 when loading tons of images from the server - https://www.tunetheweb.com/performance-test-360/

There is another site - https://www.httpvshttps.com/ which states that HTTPS is faster than HTTP, but that is because HTTPS was using HTTP/2 by default in the background.

Ruminating on DMN - a new modeling notation for business rules

We all know how the BPMN standard helped in interoperability of business process definitions across lines of business and also across organizations. But there was one element missing in the BPMN standard - i.e. the ability to model business rules/decisions in a standard way so that they can be interoperable.

Most of the current business rule engines (aka BRMS) follow a proprietary standard for modeling rules and migration from one BRMS suite to another was usually painful. Hence, we are pretty excited about DMN (Decision Model and Notation), a standard from OMG that can be considered complimentary to BPMN.

Many Rule Modeling tools such as IBM Decision Composer, OpenRules and Drools already support the DMN standard. Part of the DMN standard is also a Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL). FEEL defines a syntax for embedding expressions in the rule.
An excellent tutorial about DMN using decision tables can be found here - https://camunda.org/dmn/tutorial/. A good video tutorial on IBM decision composer is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG2rGDhowcU

It is important to understand the difference between a decision modeling tool and a decision execution engine. A decision modeling tool would give a GUI to define the decision model using the DMN standard. This decision model can be exported as a *.dmn file (which is in XML format - example here). The decision execution engine actually is the runtime to execute the model. Most of the existing rule engines have extended their support to run rules defined in DMN model. For example, the new IBM Decision Composer is a web-based rule modeling tool, but the modeled rules can be exported to run in the existing ODM engines.

So in theory, the DMN model created by one tool can be used to execute the model in another tool . Some folks have tested this and noted down the challenges in this whitepaper - The Effectiveness of DMN Portability