Building a scalable xml bridge processing platform

Question

I'm building middleware that receives a request from the Internet, connects to a locally available search platform and gets some XML back.

It then changes this XML, pruning it, and changing into some other format (probably JSON) and sends it back to the calling application.

I'm thinking of using the following technology stack to achieve this.

Tomcat + Plain old servlets

I want to get the throughput per box (quad-core, dual-cpu, 32GB ram) as high as possible, and I'm suspicious that tomcat might not be the best option and that I might be better off with a Jetty or a Grizzly or others I'm not aware of? Does anyone have some comparison data or anecdotal evidence about which technology they would start with?

If not, I guess I should start by bench-marking them with my own test data set. sigh

Answer 1

Bleeding edge, but has some nice scaling metrics: RestExpress

If you can go non-java, you might want to consider node.js