As the wide-ranging set of technical topics covered by this book attests, the application server is the centerpiece of a complex yet extremely powerful infrastructure. It is the linchpin of the new, Internet-connected and Web-interfaced set of applications that facilitate E-business. Through the application server and its Web server companion, IT organizations can fashion a completely new interface that allows employees, business partners, and customers to efficiently carry out essential transactions and interactions with the organization. And, because the new applications built on the application server are based on reusable component technologies and leverage sophisticated visual development tools, the new applications are built more efficiently and more quickly than was possible with traditional hierarchical or client/server applications that were based on procedural programming techniques.
The application server market has been building slowly since the OMG began to finalize and publish the CORBA specifications. Early application servers, based on CORBA ORBs, provided a rich set of services and supported a wide variety of languages, allowing organizations to build very sophisticated distributed object-base systems. However, it is the dominance of the World Wide Web that has propelled the application server market to dramatic growth. The Web has forced organizations of all sizes and in all industries to reengineer their very basic business processes to provide easy, yet secure, access via the Internet to a wide variety of users. This has meant a fundamental change in the “front end” of an enterprise IT infrastructure. However, the “back end,” representing the mission-critical systems that keep the key business processes of the organization running on a day-to-day basis, cannot be simply thrown away. The application server provides a way to relatively easily tie together the new front end with the back end, and support the creation of new business logic based on distributed object technology.
However, it is not just the existence of the Web and the need to tie together a Web front end with existing systems that has propelled the application server market to its current exponential growth. The Java technologies — in particular, the Enterprise JavaBeans specification and enterprise Java APIs that are a part of the J2EE platform — have brought the application server to the mainstream. Java has become the language that the majority of today’s programmers want to use. J2EE provides many of the sophisticated capabilities embodied in the CORBA specifications, yet brings it to the Java programmer as a set of ready-built services that the programmer does not need to worry about. The proliferation of feature-rich and inexpensive Java application servers, along with the visual development tools to support them, has allowed the market to blossom. This does not imply that only J2EE-based application servers are having success. More complicated environments often demand the multilanguage support and sophisticated services of a pure CORBA or mixed J2EE/CORBA approach.
In this chapter, the technologies and concepts discussed in previous chapters are illustrated in real-world examples of application servers in actual production environments. The intent is to illustrate that application servers are practical and have provided tangible benefits to a wide range of different enterprises, ranging from relatively young companies to older and established, Global 1000-class enterprise organizations.
Next, a survey of some of the application server products available on the market today is provided. The intent of this section is to provide the reader with a sense of the great variety of different solutions available. While this overview does not (and cannot) detail each and every application server available today, it highlights some of the dominant themes (such as the prevalence of J2EE adoption) and provides a sense of the relative strengths of the solutions from various vendors.
Application servers are not a new, untested product category. Application servers have been implemented by a wide variety or organizations. Financial services organizations utilize them to implement home banking, stock brokerage, insurance quotation, and other services. Telecommunication firms implement them to provide Web-based access to account billing information. New E-commerce and E-business firms (“dot-coms”) utilize them as the basis for their application infrastructure. State, federal, and local governments utilize them to provide public access to public records. The list goes on. It would be difficult to find a category of organization of any size in any geography that has not implemented application servers in the quest to achieve E-commerce or E-business.
The benefits recognized by the organizations that implement application servers are as varied as the organizations that implement them. Nonetheless, in general, the benefits include:
1. ability to support large numbers of simultaneous users or requests
2. achievement of near-100 percent availability, 24 hours a day and seven days a week
3. ability to quickly implement new business logic that has sophisticated transactional capabilities and state management
4. integration with enterprise standards for security and management
5. ability to leverage off-the-shelf application components for rapid delivery of new applications
6. integration with a wide variety of legacy data sources and applications
7. achievement of E-business goals
National Discount Brokers (NDB), a successful online stock brokerage firm, implemented application servers to support its large and growing trading volumes, which in February of 2000 had reached up to 25,000 trades per day. The system NDB implemented currently handles approximately 5000 simultaneous log-ins while maintaining satisfactory end-user responsiveness. Although impressive, the firm plans to double or even triple that capacity soon. Prior to its application server implementation, the firm’s homegrown Web-based systems had hundreds of sub-components with complex back-end connections written in C and C++. What the firm needed was a system that would provide server clustering, load balancing, and fault tolerance so that it could add capacity without changing any code. They were attracted to a J2EE-based implementation because the open standards approach would allow integration of pre-built and custom-built extensions to the firm’s back-end and legacy systems. NDB chose to implement the iPlanet Application Server with its built-in Web clustering, load balancing, and fault tolerance capabilities.1
Vodafone, a mobile telecommunication giant and the United Kingdom’s second-largest company, turned to application servers to consolidate its multiple billing systems to enable the company to keep pace with its rapidly expanding mobile telephone business. The new solution, called Unibill, replaces two legacy billing systems and several other internal applications. By consolidating these systems into a single, comprehensive, application server-based solution, Vodafone was able to vastly simplify and streamline its billing process. In addition, the comprehensive billing system is able to assist in fraud detection and also provides real-time billing data over the Web to Vodafone’s partners. While a key goal was to streamline and unify the billing process, the new system also scales beautifully. It was originally designed to support a volume of 12 million calls per peak day, but the system now regularly handles more than twice that volume of calls. Vodafone selected IBM’s WebSphere Application Server, Enterprise Edition, as the solution for its Unibill system.2
Cable & Wireless HKT is a telecommunication firm in Hong Kong and, until 1995, it had an exclusive franchise to provide local telephone service in Hong Kong. With the expiration of its exclusive franchise, the company quickly faced new competitors. The company needed to protect its market share by offering new and expanded services while reducing customer service-related costs. Like many large enterprises, the company had a number of legacy systems (IBM mainframes and DEC VAXes) that needed to be integrated into any final solution. Cable & Wireless HKT decided that a three-tier architecture based on application servers met its requirements for application partitioning and also would allow the company to build an infrastructure that includes state and session management, transaction management, database access, and result-set caching. The company was able to implement the new solution, based on the iPlanet Application Server, for its most important commercial customers in less than three months. The solution met all of the company’s requirements, and provided a quick time to market as well.3
Honeywell’s Aircraft Landing Systems is an example of a very large, traditional manufacturing organization that has complex systems supported by a variety of legacy systems. The organization previously created custom applications based on procedural programming techniques that were unique to each particular situation. The organization’s development costs were high, and the resulting systems were not completely flexible. When the organization decided it needed to move to a new Web-based application model, it decided to put an architecture in place that would allow the organization to make the optimal use of the existing legacy systems while allowing them to migrate into the world of customized off-the-shelf (COTS) software. A distributed object, three-tier architecture backed up with solid visual development tools and message queuing software was the right approach for the Honeywell division. The organization selected a combination of IBM software: WebSphere Application Server, MQSeries, and VisualAge for Java. The new development environment has dramatically reduced the organization’s software development costs, improved response times sevenfold, and preserved the investment in the variety of legacy systems.4
These examples demonstrate that application servers have been gainfully and profitably implemented by some very diverse enterprises. They also demonstrate that application servers have been utilized in mission-critical environments. The following two sections take a closer look at the environments and the decision processes of two relatively young companies, BuildPoint Corporation and FoliQuest International N.V. These case studies illustrate the types of issues and considerations that are facing large and small enterprises alike.
Case Study: BuildPoint Corporation
BuildPoint Corporation is a premier example of a new type of business that the Internet has spawned — a B2B E-commerce marketplace that electronically brings together buyers and sellers for the purpose of efficiently procuring and selling materials, supplies, equipment, and surplus or used goods. Build-Point.comSM is targeted at the building and construction industry and offers the industry’s first Internet-based procurement solution. Its goal is to bring together general contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers to make possible a vastly superior way of managing the construction bidding and procurement processes. BuildPoint’s online marketplace delivers fast, reliable, and secure E-commerce applications for the construction industry’s largest community focused on contractors and suppliers, and is the leading online destination for increasing efficiency, streamlining business processes, creating new business opportunities and partnerships, and saving time and money.
Founded in May 1999, BuildPoint is a stellar example of a successful Silicon Valley-based B2B start-up and has already won recognition by technology industry watchers for its innovative and comprehensive E-commerce site, BuildPoint.com. More than 15,000 member companies transact business over BuildPoint.com, including 40 of the Engineering News Record’s Top 400 General Contractors. Since November 1999, more than $20 billion in project volume has been transacted over BuildPoint.com. The company has (as of this writing) grown to more than 160 employees, including a nationwide salesforce made up of more than 60 people with construction industry experience.
BuildPoint.com is an online marketplace that allows buyers and sellers to negotiate for and procure construction products and services online; provides online bid solicitation management and lead generation; and offers financial services including insurance and lending. This is made possible with BuildPoint’s Open Trading Platform, an E-commerce platform comprised of Web servers, application servers, and database servers. This platform allows all users to access the various marketplaces and conduct business using a standard Web browser. The platform is built with scalability and fault tolerance in mind. Quite simply, if the system is unavailable, then the company is unable to make any money and its customers may transact their business in other ways.
When the company began its operations, it initially implemented all of its marketplace capabilities using the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server with Active Server Pages (ASP) technology to formulate the dynamic content. However, BuildPoint, with its rapid and dramatic early success, soon outgrew this technology. According to André Taube, BuildPoint’s Vice President of Engineering, the original Web server approach was well suited to relatively small environments. “Once there are many engineers involved and a complex set of data to deal with,” Taube states, “it is necessary to start separating the data from the business logic and the business logic from the Web page design.” Taube came to the conclusion that a three-tier solution, with application servers at the center, was essential to give the appropriate separation of function and also promote a design that is maintainable and fault tolerant. Taube also decided that the new application server design should be implemented on Sun Microsystems hardware running the Solaris operating environment to promote scalability. Exhibit 7.1 illustrates the current Open Trading Platform implemented by Taube and his team.
Once the decision was made to implement a three-tier solution, distributed object approach, Taube evaluated the alternatives. A Microsoft COM+ approach was considered because the current Web server was Microsoft’s IIS, but Taube preferred to move to a UNIX-based platform, feeling that the Microsoft technology was not as widely accepted by the industry as a whole. Taube also felt that it was extremely important to base the design on a technology that had widespread support from a number of different vendors to avoid being locked in, in the future, to a particular vendor’s solution. Taube’s opinion was that the right approach would be an application server that implements the Sun Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform, with Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and the Java Enterprise APIs.
Exhibit 7.1 Architecture of BuildPoint.com
With the decision to implement a J2EE solution on Sun hardware, Taube evaluated the offerings of different vendors. The WebLogic Server from BEA Systems was selected because it is a market leader and, in Taube’s opinion, offers the most complete implementation of J2EE. It was felt that sticking with a market leader was important because it indicated that many other companies had proven the product in a number of different production environments.
All users of the Open Trading Platform are using standard Web browsers communicating with the BuildPoint.com Web servers via HTTP/HTTPS. The Web servers serve static Web pages and also create dynamic pages using Java Server Pages (JSP) technology. Once a user is beyond the first few pages on the BuildPoint.com site, the majority of the remaining pages are dynamically created based on interaction with the user.
The Web servers communicate over the internal BuiltPoint.com network to a pair of Sun Enterprise 420 stackable servers, running the Solaris operating environment and the WebLogic Server. The two servers are configured identically with the same set of enterprise beans. Invocations are load balanced between these two servers; and if one of the servers fails, then the remaining server acts as a failover server. The application server supports all types of enterprise beans — stateless and stateful session beans and entity beans. Taube indicates that his team is not currently using the WebLogic Server’s ability to provide failover on stateful session beans, although they plan to do so in the future. BuildPoint has designed the system to scale, and plans to implement two more servers within the next six months.
Because BuildPoint is a relatively new company, it does not have a number of legacy systems that it needs to tie into. Therefore, the back-end tier of this implementation is quite straightforward. It consists of database servers running Oracle8i software. The WebLogic Server communicates with the database engines via the JDBC interface.
A key component of BuildPoint’s business model is these Web-based transactions. How mission-critical are the BEA WebLogic Server and the enterprise beans running on the server? It is simple. If they are not available, then BuildPoint is losing money and possibly losing customers. Taube and his team are absolutely aware of this fact, and they have designed and implemented a system that will support BuiltPoint.com today. More importantly, they have designed a system that will be able to continue to seamlessly grow as the needs of the company grow.
By insisting on implementing technology that has widespread support from the vendor community, Taube has the assurance of knowing that BuildPoint.com is not going to be stranded with obsolete technology. By selecting technology of market leaders in each segment — Sun Microsystems, Oracle, BEA Systems — Taube also knows that the products implemented at BuildPoint have been proven in countless other mission-critical environments. Taube and his team have laid a solid foundation upon which BuildPoint can continually build.
Case Study: FoliQuest International N.V.
FoliQuest International N.V. is on the leading edge when it comes to providing unique Internet-based sales services to the financial industry. The company is based in The Netherlands, but also has operations in Australia. Formed in late 1996 and now 40 employees strong, the company enhances the usual E-commerce experience by providing a unique and useful interface to a prospect for financial and insurance products. Through a Web-based dialog with the prospect, the FoliQuest Sales Support product derives a customized visualization of the products available using the prospect’s own unique data. This customized visualization helps guide the prospect to a purchase decision. Exhibit 7.2 presents how the unique FoliQuest technology and processes augment the traditional Web-based E-commerce process.
Exhibit 7.2 FoliQuest Augments the Traditional E-Commerce Process
FoliQuest’s direct customer is the financial services or insurance company offering products to consumers over the Internet. The FoliQuest Sales Support product is used within the FoliQuest client’s operations to enhance customer relationship management and customer support. For example, a financial services firm may have an in-house staff of financial advisers that access the system to provide complete financial management services to its customers. The in-house users access the system using a Windows client, while prospects access the system using a standard Web browser. Exhibit 7.3 illustrates the model for FoliQuest Sales Support.
FoliQuest provides its customers with the choice of where they would like FoliQuest Sales Support implemented. If a customer chooses to host the application in-house so that it can be responsible for all security related to this sensitive customer financial information, then FoliQuest will provide recommendations about the choice of platforms and assistance in the implementation. If, on the other hand, the customer prefers to outsource the application, then FoliQuest will work on an ASP-based implementation. FoliQuest provides a complete range of services, including situation analysis, project estimation, API development (where necessary), and implementation.
Krishnan Subramanian, lead developer at FoliQuest responsible for the server-side architecture and development, indicates that FoliQuest had several requirements in designing the infrastructure for FoliQuest Sales Support. First and foremost, the technology needed to be based on open, vendor-independent standards and interfaces so that FoliQuest is free to implement products from any vendor. Second, FoliQuest needed a distributed object-based system that would also seamlessly support Web-based users. In addition, FoliQuest needed a system that would easily attach to a wide variety of back-end data sources and legacy applications, because each of FoliQuest’s customers may have a unique set of systems and applications that would need to be integrated with the FoliQuest system. Last but not least, FoliQuest needed a system that would support scalability, load balancing, and fault tolerance because FoliQuest clients demand that Internet services be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Figure 7.3 Model for FoliQuest Sales Support
The FoliQuest technical team evaluated a number of different solutions. Not satisfied with relying on the vendors’ claims, the team carefully evaluated each of the potential solutions in terms of functionality, scalability, manageability, and fault tolerance. The team also checked to make sure that the solutions had been implemented in other production environments and had proven to be reliable and scalable in these real-world situations. Finally, the team evaluated products in terms of the ease of development and the support for development tools. The team selected the Inprise Application Server as the centerpiece of the solution.Exhibit 7.4 illustrates the architecture of the solution.
At the client side, FoliQuest must deal with two different types of users. The prospects for the financial services are consumers on the Internet, and therefore these users access the system via a standard Web browser. FoliQuest does not implement applets, applications, or client-side objects for this user base, in order to keep the system open to the widest possible set of potential users. These users connect to the Web server of the financial services or insurance company.
Figure 7.4 Architecture of FoliQuest Sales Support
The Web server hosts the company’s static pages in addition to Java Server Pages (JSPs) that provide the dynamic content. Therefore, when filling in a form with name and financial information, the prospect is doing so using a JSP. The JSP, in turn, invokes an object on the application server that implements the business logic. This division of function, where the JSP is on the Web server and the business logic is on the application server, is important to promote a fault-tolerant design.
Internal users (e.g., financial advisers and customer service representatives) use Windows clients that run an Inprise Delphi client provided by FoliQuest. The Delphi client code is based on the CORBA 2.2 specification, and these users connect directly to the Inprise Application Server which in turn provides access to back-office systems running Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or a variety of financial management applications. FoliQuest’s implementation of the client-side code allows them to easily switch server-side technology from EJB to Inprise MIDAS, if required in the future, without requiring a change to the client code.
The Inprise Application Server (IAS) 4.0.x runs on one or more NT, UNIX, or Linux servers and supports the Inprise VisiBroker 4.0 ORB. This version of the Inprise ORB supports the CORBA 2.3 specification. To provide a scalable platform, Subramanian recommends a multiprocessor system with sufficient memory and disk. The development platform used in-house by FoliQuest is a Quad Xeon Pentium III with 1 GB RAM and 512 KB internal cache running Windows NT, which provides ample processing power and memory to support the development configuration in addition to a separate configuration to support testing and commercial demonstrations. The development platform was implemented with Windows NT due to its ease of use and the internal expertise of the FoliQuest staff, although the team has also run the system on Linux and AIX with very satisfactory results.
Because the Delphi client and IAS support different levels of CORBA specifications (2.2 and 2.3, respectively), the FoliQuest technical team devised a very clever and efficient wrapper that resides on the IAS server and performs the needed translation or mapping between the client and the server.
The FoliQuest internal test system supported approximately 4000 CORBA object instances that represented about 300 enterprise beans. The enterprise beans are evenly split between stateless session beans, which implement the business logic, and entity beans, which communicate with the back-end databases using JDBC. Each entity bean maps to a particular table in the customer database. The FoliQuest technical team decided to adhere to standard JDBC calls without using any database-specific features such as stored procedures and triggers. This is so that the system can be seamlessly integrated into any database environment a customer happens to support (e.g., IBM DB2, Oracle) without rewriting any code. The architecture, based on EJB and J2EE, is flexible enough to connect to a wide variety of other legacy systems that may exist in a particular customer’s environment.
The decision to support stateless session beans rather than stateful session beans was based on two factors. First, the nature of the application is such that each invocation results in a combination of atomic database calls to allow a high degree of flexibility in identifying and setting transaction isolation levels. The second, and perhaps more important, consideration is to provide a fault-tolerant environment. Because the failover of stateful session beans is problematic at best (as discussed in Chapter 6), a stateless session bean architecture provides better protection from failure.
The FoliQuest internal test system mentioned above was a test environment in which 20 simultaneous clients called every method on every bean simultaneously. This environment approximates the load of approximately 200 to 400 simultaneous real-world end users. Based on the test results, the FoliQuest technical team estimated that a production system configured similarly to the development system (the Quad Xeon) should easily be able to handle 80,000 CORBA object instances and thousands of real-world simultaneous users while maintaining acceptable levels of performance.
The FoliQuest technical team recommends that each customer implement at least two IAS servers. Each server is configured to support the same enterprise beans and can work in either a primary-with-hot-standby mode, or can work in tandem with load balancing between the nodes. With an architecture based on stateless session beans, the failure of one server does not impact end users because the next operation they perform will be directed to the surviving server(s). In addition, with the Inprise product, the stateless session bean resources are pooled so that multiple users can share a single bean instance. When the number of users on the server increases, IAS is aware of the fact and will create more instances of the bean to support the increased work. This keeps performance acceptable to all users and supports linear scaling of the server. IAS also pools database connections in a similar manner, automatically increasing and decreasing the number of connections based on user load.
Because the Inprise Application Server is based on the company’s full-fledged ORB product (VisiBroker) and IAS supports full CORBA implementations, the team had a choice of either implementing EJB-based CORBA objects or non-EJB-based CORBA objects (which could be written in any CORBA IDL supported language, such as Java, C++, Delphi, etc.). The FoliQuest technical team decided to implement the business logic of the system using EJB rather than Java CORBA for two important reasons. First, an EJB implementation is more portable. Second, and perhaps more important, a CORBA approach would require more development work on the part of the team. With EJB, the entity beans handle all of the transaction management, including commit and rollback, and the session beans incorporate transaction isolation levels as well. With a CORBA approach, the team would have had to write the transaction management into the application (with the help of the CORBA transaction services). Similarly, database access, load balancing, object location, remote object life-cycle management, and other facilities were automatically made available to the team through the EJB container and EJB interface architecture.
The results of the efforts of the FoliQuest technical team are outstanding. The team has a platform that it knows is scalable and fault tolerant, has selected the products and technologies that fit with today’s requirements, while also knowing that the CORBA/EJB architecture selected will be flexible enough to support tomorrow’s requirements. Because one cannot dictate or control the platforms or applications that potential customers have implemented, the team has designed an approach that will work in almost any environment that might be encountered. The team has created a technology base that FoliQuest can rely on as it continues to grow and dominate the market in providing advanced Internet-based sales services to the financial industry.
A Survey of Application Servers
Thus far, there has been only a brief discussion or mention of actual application server products available on the market. The reasons for this are twofold. First, the focus of this book has been on concepts, not products. Second, the product-specific information becomes dated very quickly. A detailed feature-by-feature description of a product or a feature-by-feature comparison of products would be out-of-date by the time this book goes to press. Even the list of companies providing application servers changes over time, as new vendors enter the market, existing vendors exit the market, and previous competitors consolidate their operations and product lines.
Nonetheless, it is important in understanding the overall market to get a sense of the diversity of vendors and solutions available. Therefore, this section provides a high-level overview of the offerings of some of the current leading application server vendors; a description of where the application server produces) fit within that vendor’s overall product family; and the vendors’ relative competitive strengths in the current market. This information is then summarized in two matrices at the end of the section. The first matrix lists the application server(s) and the related products offered by 17 current vendors. The second matrix focuses on the application server product lines of these companies and summarizes the product line in terms of its support of platforms, Java/CORBA/COM, back ends, development tools, and other differentiating capabilities.
Allaire Corporation, founded in 1995, claims to have introduced the industry’s first Web application server, ColdFusion®. The company is headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, and has offices in Europe and Asia Pacific. Allaire, a publicly traded company, has reached profitability and posted revenues of $59.9 million during the first six months of 2000.
The cornerstone of the company’s product line is ColdFusion, a Web application server based on ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), a proprietary, tag-based server scripting language. Although the server language is proprietary, the communication with users and other servers is via standard HTML/XML. The server supports back-end communication with database servers, e-mail servers, other distributed object systems (CORBA, COM, EJB), LDAP servers, and FTP servers. The product supports server clustering and integrates with Cisco’s LocalDirector load balancer. ColdFusion includes its own visual development tool, ColdFusion Studio. ColdFusion was released in 1995, long before the EJB specification was available. Because it was geared to Web developers and authors, and did not have the complexity of a CORBA system, the product gained widespread adoption. Allaire claims that ColdFusion continues to be one of the most widely used application servers and states that tens of thousands of companies have deployed the server.
Allaire Spectra is a set of packaged components and services built on top of ColdFusion that include:
▪ content management
▪ workflow and process automation
▪ roles-based security
▪ personalization
▪ business intelligence
▪ syndication
Despite the historical success of ColdFusion, Allaire has entered the Java application server market with its JRun product. The JRun Server is a J2EE-based application server that is offered in three different editions. The Professional Edition represents the low end of the product line and provides support only for Java Server Pages (JSPs) and Java servlets. The Enterprise Edition adds support for EJB, messaging server (JMS), transaction server (JTS), and server clustering. The Developer Edition is a performance-limited version of the Enterprise Edition (excluding server clustering) and is available for free for development purposes only. Allaire claims that its product focuses on ease of use and implementation. In addition to standard Java JSP and servlet support, JRun supports a customer tag library. The JRun Studio is the companion integrated development environment; it is a separately licensed product.
ATG, publicly traded and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in 1991 as a provider of Internet products and services. The company’s revenue was $21.5 million in the first three months of 2000.
The company offers two suites of products under the product line named the Dynamo® E-business Platform. The two suites are built on a common set of server-based products. The ATG Dynamo Customer Management Suite provides capabilities to enable online customer relationship management. This suite is built with four server products: Dynamo Scenario Server, Dynamo Personalization Server. Dynamo Application Server, and Dynamo Control Center. The second suite of products, the ATG Dynamo Commerce Suite, provides online commerce capabilities. It is built on five ATG Dynamo server products — the four that are included in the Customer Management Suite, plus the Dynamo Commerce Server.
The framework for both suites is built with the ATG Dynamo Application Server. This application server now provides full J2EE support. Other capabilities provided with this server include:
▪ wireless support: support for the Wireless Markup Language (WML)
▪ messaging support: a messaging infrastructure based on the JMS API
▪ transaction management: a transaction manager is built in; supports two-phase commit
▪ security: supports a security API
▪ session federation: supports the live exchange of customer information across servers
▪ scalable page building design: pages using the proprietary Dynamo Server Page templates are compiled quickly and efficiently using object and thread re-use
▪ server clusters: sessions are load balanced across multiple servers based on server load; request and session failover is supported
The Dynamo Scenario Server allows an organization to create customized sequences of customer interactions over the life cycle of the relationship with the customer. The Dynamo Personalization Server utilizes user profiling and content targeting to customize the presentation of Web information. The Dynamo Commerce Server supports B2B and B2C features such as product catalog presentation, multiple pricing schemes, multiple payment types, multiple shipping addresses, and recurring purchasing events. The Dynamo Control Center is the management component; it supports a unified user interface to allow all components within the Dynamo E-business Platform to be administered and managed.
BEA Systems, Inc., formed in 1995 and based in San Jose, California, is a leading provider of middleware software solutions. The company’s annual revenue is approximately $464 million (as of January 31, 2000) and it operates in about 26 countries worldwide. The company has formed strategic alliances with a number of heavyweights in the industry, including IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, PeopleSoft, and Unisys. It counts some impressive E-business names among its customers: Amazon.com, E*TRADE, and FedEx, to name a few.
BEA Systems was formed with the purpose of supplying middleware software solutions. Its original product, BEA Tuxedo®, is a transaction processing monitor that has been implemented by a number of large enterprise accounts. The company entered the application server marketplace in September 1998 by acquiring WebLogic, and now is considered by some research firms to be the leading application server vendor. BEA also offers a host integration server (BEA eLink™), the BEA WebLogic Commerce Server™, the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server™, and the WebGain Studio.
BEA offers two application servers: BEA WebLogic and BEA WebLogic Enterprise. The BEA WebLogic server is a J2EE-based application server. The company has long been an advocate of Java application servers, and claims that its latest version (5.1.0) has the first implementation of the yet-to-be-finalized EJB 2.0 specification. WebLogic Enterprise extends the product line and includes a native C++ CORBA ORB implementation and a transaction processing (TP) framework that leverages the company’s Tuxedo technology and shields the application programmer from some of the complexities of a CORBA implementation. The WebLogic servers provide sophisticated scalability, load balancing, and failover capabilities.
BEA offers two related products that leverage the company’s database connectivity capabilities. BEA WebLogic Express™ is a subset of the BEA WebLogic server that combines the WebLogic JDBC interface with Java-based presentation capabilities to allow developers to quickly and easily implement Web-to-database applications. The BEA WebLogic jDriver family provides a family of two-tier and multitier drivers for accessing different databases using the JDBC standard.
The WebLogic Commerce Server is built on top of the WebLogic Server. It provides many of the capabilities common to E-commerce sites, including catalog, shopping cart, inventory management, order management, shipping components, and a product recommendation engine. All components are written in Java, and the Commerce Server includes the Personalization Server. The Personalization Server allows organizations to easily define rules that associate particular Web site content to individual users or groups of users.
The WebGain Studio supports a variety of different development tasks, including HTML authoring; JSP editing; development of Java applets, servlets, applications, CORBA objects, and EJB components; and mapping of back-end data sources with components. WebGain Studio supports a variety of different application servers, including WebLogic, and is separately licensed.
The BEA eLink product is a platform for connectivity to a variety of different legacy systems. It supports different adapter types, each of which plugs into a particular legacy system or application. BEA supports adapters for ERP, CRM, Telco, and mainframe applications. The company also provides a development kit for those organizations that need to build a specific adapter type.
Bluestone Software, a public company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was formed in 1995 and was one of the first companies to offer a Web application server product. The company booked approximately $16.7 million of revenue in the first half of 2000. The company’s flagship product was its Sapphire/Web® application server.
The Sapphire/Web product has been renamed the Total-e-Server in order to align the product within the company’s burgeoning product portfolio. The application server is a part of the Total-e-Business platform (TeB platform) that encompasses the complete Bluestone portfolio. The other products within TeB include Total-e-B2B, Total-e-B2C, Total-e-Wireless, and Total-e-Global.
The Total-e-Server application server currently supports the J2EE platform, although the product has been around for number of years and the base architecture predates the availability of J2EE. Therefore, the implementation is a hybrid that is written in Java and can run in any JVM. It supports both EJBs and Java objects. The internal communication between elements in the server, however, leverages XML because the company was an early supporter of XML technology. Therefore, persistence management and state management, among other features, is implemented using XML internally. The architecture of the product has long supported scalability through server clusters and load balancing and failover. The server supports a connector architecture for connectivity to back-end data and application sources, and the company offers a number of prebuilt connectors.
The remaining products in the TeB platform are built on top of the core Total-e-Server. Total-e-B2B allows organizations to exchange real-time information with a variety of constituents, including business partners and suppliers. This facilitates the automation of the supply chain and enhances logistics operations. Total-e-B2B is based on XML technology for cross-platform communication. Total-e-B2C provides the ability to customize the online experience of customers and provides a ready-to-deploy storefront to expedite the E-commerce implementation. Total-e-Wireless extends the legacy systems and corporate databases reached by the new applications to users with cellular phones, personal digital assistance, and other handheld devices. Total-e-Global is a package of all the other elements of the TeB platform: Total-e-Server, Total-e-B2B, Total-e-B2C, and Total-e-Wireless.
GemStone Systems is one of the veteran companies offering application servers. Formed in 1982, the company developed applications and application servers for Smalltalk environments. Therefore, the company has a rich history in distributed object technologies. An early devotee of Java, the company offered one of the industry’s first Java application servers. Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, the company has operations in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland, and has a worldwide network of distributors. GemStone Systems is currently a privately held company, although German E-business software provider Brokat Infosystems AG signed a definitive agreement in June 2000 to acquire GemStone.
The company offers two products, both application servers. GemStone/S is the company’s Smalltalk-based application server. It was first made commercially available in 1986 and has been refined over time. Smalltalk is one of the early object-oriented programming languages. The server supports Smalltalk clients and Java clients natively, and can communicate with CORBA-compliant applications using the optional GemORB. GemStone/S has a back-end connector, GemConnect, that integrates with the Oracle database. Developers can construct wrappers to communicate with a variety of other back-end data sources and applications. The GemStone/S architecture can manage state for up to one billion objects and can support transaction-intensive applications involving gigabytes of data and hundreds of concurrent users.
GemStone/J is the company’s Java application server, first introduced in 1997. GemStone/J offers a line of four different products, offering a range of capabilities.
1. Web Edition: low end of the product line; supports JSP, servlets, JNDI, XML; optional JDBC, JMS, SSL
2. Component Edition: adds EJB and JTA to capabilities in Web Edition
3. Enterprise Edition: adds JDBC and JMS as core APIs and also adds all four Java security APIs (JSA, JCA, JCE, JAAS) to capabilities in Component Edition; includes ORB, Persistent Cache Architecture (PCA) for scalability, and Extreme Clustering™ for server clustering
4. Commerce Automation Edition: adds process automation engine to capabilities in Enterprise Edition to simplify building of B2B site
HAHT Commerce, Inc., is a privately held company headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was formed in 1995 and operates seven direct sales offices in the United States. The company also maintains international offices and regional headquarters at seven additional locations. The company positions itself as a leading supplier of B2B E-commerce solutions.
The company was an early entrant into the application server market with its HAHTsite Application Server, now renamed the HAHTsite Scenario Server. This product, unlike many of the other application servers on the market, provides full and native support for Microsoft’s DNA (COM/DCOM) architecture. The product also supports XML, Java, and CORBA. The server currently provides support for Java servlets and a number of the Java enterprise APIs: JNDI, JTS, JDBS, and others. It does not yet support the full J2EE specification, although the company indicates that it is committed to provide full J2EE support in the future. The product provides support for CORBA by bundling the Inprise VisiBroker for Java with the HAHTsite Scenario Server.
The HAHTsite Scenario Server supports back-end data and application sources in a variety of different ways. The HAHT Java e-Connector (JEC) for SAP R/3 is an HAHT-provided connector that is integrated with the server and also the HAHT Scenario Workbench, the company’s IDE. It creates proxies that can be accessed by both Java and HAHTtalk Basic applications. Database access is available to JDBC, ODBC, and OLE DB data sources. Another technology that can be utilized for back-end connectivity is the company’s Enterprise Solution Modules (ESM) rapid application development enhancements that allow developers to rather easily integrate ERP, mainframe, security, and other systems with the HAHTsite server. Finally, XML can be used to access XML-enabled Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) environments and third-party middleware components.
The server is augmented with two development tools. The HAHTsite Scenario Workbench is a full IDE tool that supports the creation of HAHTsite applications and links to back-end sources. The HAHTsite Scenario Publisher is a complementary product that offers a subset of functionality. It is intended for Web site authors and designers who do not have to deal with the creation of application code.
The company offers a range of products intended to support the complete B2B E-commerce life cycle, branded the HAHT Commerce e-Scenarios product line. HAHT Market helps attract new customers through personalized B2B interactions and channel campaign management. HAHT Shop supports the selling process by providing knowledge-based product selection and configuration in addition to cross-sell and up-sell capabilities. HAHT Track supports the fulfillment process with real-time order and shipment information. HAHT Support provides an ongoing service relationship with the customer. Additional products include the HAHT Catalog, which can be used stand-alone or with the HAHT Commerce e-Scenarios products, and HAHT Sellside Links, which provides links from the Commerce e-Scenarios platform to multiple E-marketplaces.
Once the industry’s dominant computer company with a majority market share in many different segments (i.e., system hardware, peripherals, software, and networking), IBM has changed considerably over the last couple of decades. The company was unable to hold onto its dominance in the face of rapid changes such as the migration to client/server and distributed computing models and the movement to TCP/IP-based networks. Nonetheless, the company is still the 800-pound gorilla in many of the markets in which it competes, and boasts a 1999 revenue line of $87.5 billion. Mainframe sales continue to be strong, and the company is doing well selling its UNIX-based servers and other servers as well. Its service and consulting product lines are growing rapidly and the company is dominating many of the software markets in which it participates.
The IBM software product lines are diverse and include Lotus groupware, Tivoli management software, DB2 database management, MQSeries message queuing software, and a growing list of software products to facilitate E-business. The WebSphere product line is the called the “software platform for E-business.” The WebSphere branding has been applied to a wide variety of software tools and products, from the VisualAge line of development tools, to MQSeries, and even Web site analysis tools. At the center of the branding, however, is the WebSphere Application Server line of products.
There are three different products within the WebSphere Application Server product line. The Standard Edition represents the low end of the product line. It supports key Java server technologies (JSP, servlets, JDBC) but does not support EJBs. The Standard Edition also provides an integrated IBM HTTP server and XML/XSL support. The Advanced Edition, the middle product in the product line, includes everything in the Standard Edition and adds full EJB support; IBM LDAP Directory; DB2 server; deployment support for EJBs, servlets, and JSPs; and support for distributed transactions and transaction processing. The Enterprise Edition represents the high end of the IBM application server product line. It includes all of the features of the Advanced Edition and adds complete CORBA ORB implementation (via IBM Component Broker), support for MQSeries® and TXSeries™, component backup and restore support, XML-based team development functions, and integrated Encina support. The IBM WebSphere product line provides support for a very comprehensive set of operating systems. The list of operating systems supported include Windows NT/2000, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, IBM OS/400, HP-UX, Red Hat Linux, Caldera Linux, Novell NetWare, and IBM OS/390 (note: not all editions and versions support all operating systems).
IBM offers a wide variety of related products, most of which have been branded with the WebSphere brand. Several solutions build on top of the Application Server to accelerate the implementation of E-business solutions: WebSphere Commerce Suite, WebSphere B2B Integrator, and WebSphere Business Components. The WebSphere Host Integration Solution provides integration with a wide variety of legacy back ends and Web-to-host capabilities. A number of the products are geared to Web site design and delivery: WebSphere Site Analyzer, WebSphere Portal Server, and WebSphere Personalization, among others. The WebSphere Studio combines many IBM development tools, such as the VisualAge line, into a comprehensive suite of tools. Finally, there are a variety of different network services and related products (e.g., WebSphere Edge Server) that augment the overall WebSphere Application Server environment.
iE (formerly Intelligent Environments) is a United Kingdom-based company, publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange (AIM). The company was formed in 1985 and operates internationally through offices in London, Boston, and Chicago. The company’s mission is to become a leading supplier of E-commerce applications to the finance industry. It sells and distributes product in more than 20 countries and counts many leading banking and insurance companies as clients.
The company provides a comprehensive family of financial applications, iE NetFinance, to support sales and service to banking, insurance, and investment clients. The company also provides three technology products that are sold separately: iE AM, iE ScreenSurfer, and iE Integrator.
iE AM is a client/server development tool for creating graphical user interface (GUI) applications that integrate mainframe data for the traditional “fat client.” Originally supported on OS/2, the product now supports the Windows family of operating systems.
iE ScreenSurfer is an HTML conversion gateway product that translates host screens (3270 or 5250) into standard HTML. ScreenSurfer can be deployed stand-alone, or it can be integrated with an Allaire ColdFusion application server or any Web server implementing Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. The ScreenSurfer server then becomes a co-processor to these servers, providing host access middleware functionality.
iE Integrator is the company’s application server product. It is unique in that the focus of the product is on providing connectivity to a variety of legacy back ends, including many legacy datastream applications, transaction systems, and messaging systems. The product is based on a Microsoft COM/DCOM engine. The development language supported by the platform is Microsoft JScript (Microsoft’s implementation of JavaScript). It interoperates with JavaBeans and CORBA objects (based on the CORBA 2.1 specification). iE Integrator can deliver content from a single application to HTML, XML, DCOM, and CORBA clients. The product is optimized to run on Windows NT/2000 and is integrated with many of the Microsoft server-based products and technologies such as SNA Server, Transaction Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and NT security.
Today’s Inprise Corporation represents a combination of Borland, a maker of development tools and middleware, and Visigenic, a renowned CORBA ORB provider. The company currently is posting revenue of approximately $93 million for a six-month period, or almost $200 million annually. The company has operations around the world and is headquartered in Scotts Valley, California.
Inprise has three different product families: (1) the Developer Tools product family, which maintains the Borland name through branding, provides many rich and leading tools to support Java, C++, and Windows development efforts; (2) the Enterprise product family, which generally leverages the Inprise name for branding, includes the AppCenter management platform, the Inprise Application Server, Entera middleware, and VisiBroker; and (3) the product family comprised of a miscellaneous collection of products, including Pascal tools, C++ compilers, and database products.
The Inprise Application Server is built on the company’s VisiBroker ORB. The VisiBroker ORB is the most widely implemented CORBA ORB, and is OEM’d by a number of companies. The ORB also supports the latest OMG specifications, including the Portable Object Adapter (POA) and Objects by Value (OBV). The Inprise Application Server also offers a complete implementation of the J2EE platform. Therefore, the Inprise Application Server is a hybrid CORBA/J2EE platform, with comprehensive support for objects of both types. For example, CORBA objects and enterprise beans can reside in the same container. The product supports RMI-over-IIOP, but also IDL-to-Java mapping and Java-to-IDL reverse mapping to support full interoperability between CORBA objects, CORBA clients, EJBs, and EJB clients. The product supports flexible configurations of containers and objects in a cluster environment. Different containers in a cluster can contain a different set of beans/objects, and beans/objects can reside in different containers on different servers to provide failover for one another. The product supports failover of stateless session beans, stateful session beans, bean-managed persistent entity beans, and container-managed persistent entity beans. The Inprise Application Server implements scalability, load balancing, and fault tolerance by clustering different servers together using the CORBA Naming Service. The product also pools server resources and performs other optimizations to maximize scalability within a single server.
The company offers, as an optional extension to the Inprise Application Server, several separate CORBA services implemented by Prism Technologies. The optional services are available under the product line name OpenFusion and include Trading Service, Notification Service, LifeCycle Service, Property Service, Collection Service, Concurrency Service, Relationship Service, and Time Service. Another option offered is the Secure Gatekeeper, which supports SSL over IIOP for secure CORBA object communication.
The Inprise Application Server supports a visual administrative interface and a variety of capabilities that are included with the server. However, the company also offers a stand-alone management platform, AppCenter, that integrates with the VisiBroker ORB and the Inprise Application Server and augments the native administrative capabilities of those products. AppCenter is a visual tool that allows the administrator to manage to the object or component level. It visually displays all containers and ORB, along with the objects and components associated with them.
Borland built a highly respected name in the software development community by providing advanced tools for a number of different languages and environments. The company’s JBuilder is one of the leading Java integrated development environments and supports the visual development of Java applications, applets, servlets, EJBs, JavaBeans, and CORBA objects.
IONA Technologies, which dubs itself the “Enterprise Portal Company,” was formed in 1991 and posted revenues of $105 million in 1999. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, the company maintains its U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, and offices in 25 countries. The company provides E-business infrastructure solutions that allow its customer to build enterprise portals, E-commerce sites, and large-scale distributed applications.
The company made its name in the industry by providing CORBA-based products. The company claims that it is the market leading CORBA supplier and that its Orbix ORB is the “world’s most popular” ORB. Orbix 2000 is a CORBA 2.3-compliant ORB that forms the basis of the iPortal family of products. The company also offers a newer version, Orbix 3, that is compliant with the new CORBA 3.0 specification and is also part of a new product family. Besides Orbix 3, this family includes OrbixWeb, a Java ORB implementation; OrbixOTM, an IONA Object Transaction Monitor; Orbix for OS/390, an implementation of Orbix on IBM’s mainframe operating system; and messaging products to support asynchronous messaging based on CORBA Events and Notification services.
IONA has augmented its traditional CORBA product line with the addition of the IONA iPortal Suite. This is an integrated product line offering server-based solutions for designing, developing, and deploying robust enterprise portals. The iPortal Suite is a modular offering that includes the following individual products:
1. Orbix 2000. Orbix 2000 is compliant with the CORBA 2.3 specification, and supports IONA’s patented Adaptive Runtime Technology™ (ART) to allow individual services and code to be added dynamically during runtime. It supports IONA’s Portable Object Adapter and the CORBA 3.0-compliant Persistent State Service (PSS) and Asynchronous Messaging Interfaces (AMI).
2. iPortal Server. This is the “Web-facing” element that separates the business logic from the content. It supports XML/XSL and communicates with the application server and other elements (EJBs, CORBA objects, etc.).
3. iPortal Integration Server. This is the hub-and-spoke messaging platform that supports publish and subscribe and multicast messages. It supports adapters that connect to a wide variety of applications, including SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, CICS, IMS, and custom applications.
4. iPortal OS/390 Server. Built on Orbix for OS/390, the iPortal OS/390 Server enables mainframe-based applications written in COBOL, PL/I, Java, or C++ to take advantage of the distributed object environment. It supports connectors for RACF, SNA, DB2, MQSeries, and other mainframe systems.
5. iPortal Application Server. This is a J2EE-based application server built on the ART and the IONA Portable Object Adapter for a scalable EJB container that supports hot pluggability and hot reconfiguration. It includes Graphical Application Builder, a drag-and-drop component assembly and deployment environment.
In March 1999, the iPlanet alliance was formed by Sun, Netscape, and AOL. The alliance is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has presence in the local offices of Sun and AOL around the world. The purpose of the alliance is to build, market, and service E-commerce infrastructure solutions. The alliance offers a broad range of consulting services in addition to its software products.
The alliance offers a broad array of software E-commerce solutions in the following categories:
1. Web servers: iPlanet Web Server and Netscape FastTrack Server
2. application servers: iPlanet Application Server, iPlanet Application Builder, iPlanet Application Server (Process Automation Edition), Netscape Extension Builder
3. directory and security services: iPlanet Directory Server, iPlanet MetaDirectory, Netscape Delegated Administrator, iPlanet Certificate Management System
4. messaging and collaboration software: Netscape Messaging Server, Sun Internet Messaging Server, iPlanet Calendar Server
5. E-commerce software: iPlanet ECXpert, iPlanet TradingXpert
6. corporate procurement software: iPlanet BuyerXpert
7. online selling applications:iPlanet SellerXpert, iPlanet MerchantXpert
8. content information services: Netscape PublishingXpert
9. online bill presentment and payment: iPlanet BillerXpert
It should be no surprise, given Sun’s involvement in the alliance, that the iPlanet Application Server is a pure Java, J2EE-based application server. It supports JSPs, Java serlvets, and EJBs. The alliance claims that its latest release, in beta testing as of this writing, is the industry’s first application server product to achieve full J2EE certification. The product’s primary emphasis is on full support for J2EE, but the product is also known for its ability to scale and to provide load balancing and fault tolerance. The server allows applications to be distributed across multiple CPUs and multiple machines, and supports connection caching, pooling, and results caching for scalability. The server supports failover by distributing transaction state and session information across multiple servers in a cluster. It is one of the handful of application servers that supports failover for stateful session beans. The product includes connectors that integrate the J2EE applications with SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, IBM CICS, and BEA Tuxedo systems.
The iPlanet Application Builder is a companion tool for the application server that allows developers to easily build and deploy applications for the iPlanet Application Server. The tool provides an integrated workspace of graphical tools for a stand-alone development environment, but also interoperates with a number of leading integrated development environments (IDEs).
The iPlanet Application Server integrates with the iPlanet Web Server and the iPlanet Directory Server. With this approach, the Web server and directory server monitor any updates made to the application server clusters or applications so that the administrator does not have to reflect the changes manually. The directory server manages the password policies and user groups for the application server. The load-balancing and clustering capabilities of the application server are performed by the directory server.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, has long supported both server and client software product lines. Prior to the release of the Windows 2000 operating system, the company’s server product line was branded the Microsoft BackOffice family of products and included products such as Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SNA Server, among others.
Until recently, Microsoft did not have a stand-alone application server product per se. It has offered the Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) as a part of the BackOffice family since 1996, which provided some of the capability of other application servers. However, with the release of Windows 2000, the company has now released the Microsoft Application Center 2000, a COM/DCOM- and Windows 2000-specific product that is tightly integrated with the Windows 2000 server.
Application Center 2000 is a COM+ platform that provides the transactional support previously found in MTS and the message queuing support found in the previous MSMQ. The server provides many of the capabilities of a CORBA or EJB system, such as the support for persistent and non-persistent objects. However, it only supports objects based on the COM/DCOM architecture and there is no built-in interoperability with EJB or CORBA systems at this time. Please note that the product was still in beta testing as of this writing and features will change over time.
The big news of the Application Center 2000 is its Web clustering, network load balancing, and component-based dynamic load balancing that the product gains by working with the Windows 2000 operating system. Scalability has been a concern in the past with Microsoft’s MTS when compared to other application servers and transaction systems, especially when compared to systems running on high-end UNIX servers or even mainframe systems. The Application Center 2000 components are automatically replicated across multiple servers running in a cluster. Failures are automatically routed around and, in some cases, the transaction will continue without a hitch. Load balancing is based on server response time rather than a simple round-robin approach. Developers can use their familiar development tools, such as Visual Basic and Visual C++, to develop applications for the Application Center 2000.
Oracle Corporation is the industry’s leading supplier of software for information management and the world’s second-largest independent software company. Formed in 1977 and headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, the company operates in 145 countries and has 43,000 employees worldwide. The company has annual revenues in excess of $10 billion.
Oracle has made a huge investment over the last few years in Internet-enabling its product lines. The company now markets a wide variety of products and applications designed to expedite and enable the process of implementing an E-business strategy. Its E-Business Suite of products provides a set of applications designed to support all of the E-business initiatives of a large, complex, global enterprise. The E-Business Suite provides Web integration of marketing, sales, service, manufacturing, supply chain, financial operations, project management, human resources operations, and business intelligence systems.
At the foundation of the Oracle family of products is the Oracle Internet Platform. The centerpiece of this product line is the company’s Internet-enabled database management platform, Oracle8i. Interestingly, Oracle8i is fully equipped with Java technology and can serve as a stand-alone, database-centric Web server. Nonetheless, included in the Oracle Internet Platform product line is the Oracle Internet Application Server (iAS) 8i. The company positions Oracle8i as the product that manages the data, while the Oracle iAS is the product that runs all the applications. The Oracle Internet Platform line also includes development tools, business intelligence tools, connectivity product, an Internet file management products, an integration server, systems management, and data warehousing products.
Oracle iAS, like many application servers, supports the J2EE specification and so therefore supports EJBs and the Java enterprise APIs. What sets it apart from other application servers is the product’s very tight integration with Oracle8i and its sophisticated data management and data caching capabilities. For example, it supports data caching to offload processing from the backend Oracle8i server. It also supports the company’s own PL/SQL Server Pages technology that allows SQL statements to be embedded within HTML. The product also supports a PL/SQL engine that executes PL/SQL stored procedures.
Oracle iAS, like many other application servers, includes an HTTP server and will execute servlets, JSPs, and scripts. Although many application servers include this same functionality, most vendors do not position the application server as an all-in-one Web server with application and business logic support. Oracle, on the other hand, positions the combination of Oracle8i and Oracle iAS as a comprehensive, total solution for organizations wishing to deploy Web-based applications such as portals, transactional applications, business intelligence facilities, mobile applications, and enterprise integration.
The Oracle iAS comes in two versions: Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. The Standard Edition is a comprehensive version that includes HTTP server; JSP and servlet engine; Perl script interpreter; PL/SQL page support; and a full JVM that contains EJB, CORBA, and database stored procedure call support. The Enterprise Edition adds PL/SQL execution, middle-tier caching, forms and reports services, Discoverer Viewer support, and enhanced management server.
Orbware Ltd. is a United Kingdom-based company that was incorporated on December 17, 1999, the same day that Sun released the EJB 1.1 and J2EE 1.2 specifications. Orbware’s primary objective is to provide a high-quality commercial application server that fully implements the J2EE specification.
The company claims to have one of the first application server products that does not predate the EJB specification. The advantage, it claims, is that it does not have a legacy infrastructure or proprietary technology underpinning the application server. The current product available is the OrCAS Enterprise Server v4.0 for EJB, which is a clean-room implementation of the EJB 1.1 specification. The product runs on Windows NT, Sun Solaris, and Linux operating systems. It is very aggressively priced, starting at $795 per server. In addition, developers can use the product without charge for an unlimited amount of time.
The next product that will be released by Orbware is the OrCAS Enterprise Server v5.0 for J2EE. This version will combine the OrCAS EJB server implementation with the Apache Web server and the Tomcat Java servlet and JSP engine.
Orbware also offers a hosting solution for Application Service Providers (ASPs), which the company claims is the first ASP solution offered by a J2EE licensee. The OrCAS Hosting Solution includes the OrCAS Enterprise Server and features that facilitate the provision of hosting services for J2EE applications, including:
▪ virtual hosting to run multiple applications in a single server instance
▪ billing and metering capabilities
▪ a Web interface for uploading and managing applications
Persistence Software was founded in 1991 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company operates five sales offices in the United States and has offices in ten additional countries. The company is publicly traded and posted revenues of approximately $14.4 million in 1999 and $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2000.
The company has almost a decade of experience in application servers. Its original product, PowerTier for C++, is still being sold, and the company has added to the PowerTier product line with the PowerTier for EJB server. The company also has a new product line, Dynamai, that provides dynamic, application-aware caching of Web content.
PowerTier for C++ is defined as a “transactional application server.” Its emphasis is on efficient and fast data access that is based on two technology patents. The first patent provides object-relational mapping that automates persistence of CORBA objects. The second patent is a shared transactional object cache that improves data access performance by providing an inmemory cache of objects and their relationships rather than using disk-based storage. The product is integrated with IONA’s Orbix ORB.
The Persistence PowerTier for EJB utilizes the technology in its predecessor to reduce the development time for EJBs. According to the company, the object-relational mapping technology that is a part of the PowerTier Development Kit can reduce the development time by up to 20 times compared to other EJB tools. The technology automatically generates container-managed entity beans directly from a database schema or object model, which eliminates the need to directly code JDBC function calls. PowerTier for EJB supports the JTS specification of J2EE, provides a servlet container system, and supports a variety of different clients, including Java, HTML, XML, C++, COM, and CORBA. The product does not implement the entire J2EE specification.
SilverStream Software, based in Billerica, Massachusetts, is publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange. It began shipping its first product in November 1997. The company posted revenues of over $31 million for the first six months of 2000, compared to only $7.8 million during the same period in 1999.
The company’s product line, named the SilverStream eBusiness Platform, is comprised of four products. The centerpiece of the product line is the SilverStream Application Server. Offered as a separate option is the company’s jBroker, a complete CORBA ORB written in Java. Two new products, ePortal and xCommerce, are built on top of the company’s application server and offer specific solutions for customer relationship management (CRM) and B2B, respectively.
The SilverStream Application Server is a J2EE application server. It supports a number of features to support scalability within a server. It also supports server clustering, server load balancing, and session-level failover. It comes equipped with the company’s jBroker ORB and can support CORBA objects; it also supports COM objects. jBroker is compliant with the CORBA 2.3 specification and supports the Portable Object Adapter, Objects by Value, IIOP over SSL, and other key new CORBA capabilities.
The SilverSteam ePortal solution provides a framework and components to facilitate the flexible creation of B2B, B2C, and B2E portals. SilverStream’s xCommerce family consists of three products: (1) the xCommerce Server is a Java framework that runs on top of the SilverStream Application Server or other J2EE-compliant Java application server; (2) the xCommerce Enterprise Enablers are adapters that provide XML-enablement to a variety of legacy back ends such as IBM mainframe applications; and (3) the xCommerce Designer is a visual environment that integrates XML-formatted information with XML documents.
Sybase, Inc., founded in 1984 and headquartered in Emeryville, California, is one of the leading database management software suppliers and one of the ten largest independent software vendors. Sybase posted revenues of $460 in the first six months of 2000. It operates in 60 countries worldwide and focuses on certain vertical markets: financial services, health care, telecommunications and media, the public sector, retail, and wireless. The company has two wholly owned subsidiaries and three product divisions: the Enterprise Solutions Division, the Business Intelligence Division, and the Internet Applications Division.
The Sybase Enterprise Application Server is actually an integrated set of different application servers. It consists of PowerDynamo, Jaguar CTS, Application Integrator (AI) for CICS, Application Integrator (AI) for Stored Procedures, Application Integrator (AI) for CORBA, and Adaptive Server Anywhere.
PowerDynamo is a Web server that serves static and dynamic pages. It supports DynaScript, which is a Sybase, JavaScript-like scripting language that embeds SQL or COMPONENT statements within HTML pages. PowerDynamo can access the Jaguar server components through Java, ActiveX, SQL queries, or PowerDynamo tags.
Jaguar CTS is the distributed component engine for the Sybase Enterprise Application Server. According to the company, it combines the features of a transaction-processing monitor and an ORB. It provides full J2EE support with the exception, at the time of this writing, of JSP support.
AI for CICS and AI for Stored Procedures enable Jaguar to access stored procedure and mainframe COBOL programs. AI for CORBA allows developers to create EJBs for Jaguar that can communicate with existing CORBA objects. Adaptive Server Anywhere is a full-featured SQL database server that supports the Jaguar server.
The Sybase Enterprise Application Server is sold in three different editions. The Small Business Edition supports a limited number of connections to Jaguar. The Advanced Edition provides unlimited connections and adds server clustering for scalability, load balancing, and fault tolerance. The Enterprise Edition adds a transaction monitor, object persistence, and CICS and stored procedure connectivity.
Exhibit 7.5 summarizes the names of the application server and related products offered by the vendors examined.
Exhibit 7.6 summarizes the capabilities of the application server products. The matrix contains a single entry for each product line. Therefore, the information in that row could apply to any of the individual products within the line. For example, a cell that indicates “J2EE” as the Java support only means that at least one product in the line provides full support for the J2EE platform (i.e., EJB plus enterprise APIs); individual products within the line may only support a subset of the platform. The information for this matrix was drawn from publicly available sources and any errors or omissions are unintentional.
To be sure, the field of competitors providing application server solutions is crowded. That is both good news and bad news to the IT manager trying to make a strategic decision. The good news is that there are several competent products from which to choose. The bad news, of course, is that there are just as many options, and vendors make many similar-sounding claims about scalability, fault tolerance, ease of development, etc.
The J2EE platform, while spurring this market to greater growth, has added to the number of vendors providing solutions and also has blurred the distinction (at least on the outside) between the various products. Many vendors claim full J2EE support. However, there is a lot of latitude in how that support is implemented within a particular product. There are many questions to ask about a particular implementation. Some application server offerings today seem more like a bundle of separate products rather than a fully integrated solution that works seamlessly together. And while J2EE support implies that an ORB is the foundation of the product, that does not mean that a J2EE-compliant application server provides the rich and full set of CORBA services specified by the OMG (nor is the full set of services required in many environments). The point is that it is difficult to evaluate a complex and rich product like an application server solely based on the information printed on a glossy data sheet.
Exhibit 7.5 Application Server and Related Products of Some Vendors
When evaluating different application server solutions today, it is important to keep the future in mind. This market, like many technology product markets, will undergo consolidation. In fact, the early signs are already there because some vendors have already exited the market, and some mergers have taken place. Within the next few years, the leaders will emerge and any other remaining solutions will be targeted to specific niches or verticals. Nobody has a crystal ball to map the future with precision, but the current leaders are likely to continue to gain market share. The second tier of vendors will be comprised of those that have standards-based solutions but also provide good, solid support for the enterprise deployment issues covered in Chapter 6 — namely, security, scalability, load balancing, fault tolerance, and management. Good tools that speed the development process will also be an important differentiating factor.
Another thing to keep in mind about the future is that neither CORBA nor Java specifications are “complete” or “finished.” CORBA 3.0 specifications are available and products are already becoming available that support the specifications. With CORBA 3.0, the integration of EJBs and CORBA objects will be more complete; CORBA objects and enterprise beans will be able to co-reside in the same container. The CORBA component container will provide many of the services already provided by EJB containers, and will simplify the development task by automatically taking care of some of the transactional, persistence, and security capabilities. CORBA naming services will support URLs, and Internet firewall support will be built into the specifications. Further enhancements to CORBA will support specific computing environments such as embedded systems.
Just as CORBA is not sitting still, Java and J2EE will continue to evolve as well. The Java Community ProcessSM, which is the program utilized by Sun to foster the evolution of Java technologies using an open forum approach, is continuing to solicit and evaluate ideas and requests for enhancements from the community. Some recent requests that have been accepted by the JCP and will eventually result in new platforms or standards include:
▪ J2EE 1.3 specification
▪ JDBC 3.0 specification
▪ Java servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specification
▪ J2EE Management
▪ RMI Security
▪ Generic Security Services API
▪ Java APIs for XML Messaging
▪ and many others...
Exhibit 7.6 Summary of Application Server Product Line Functionality
* Supports interoperability with systems supporting objects of this type.
Of course, J2EE 1.3 is the biggest Java news on the horizon for application server customers and vendors. Without this specification, which formalizes many new enhancements such as a standard connector framework for integration with back-end systems, the vendor community will fragment and begin to offer proprietary extensions to J2EE 1.2 to solve certain needs. The good news is that most of the application vendors mentioned in this chapter are members of the group finalizing the definition of J2EE 1.3, so it is a good bet that most of them will implement it fairly quickly once it is finalized.
Although the focus of much of the industry is on J2EE and CORBA, it is important to also recognize the potential importance of COM/DCOM in the future. Microsoft, with its release of Windows 2000 and the Application Center 2000, has built in key capabilities such as clustering, load balancing, and fault tolerance that will be important for many customers. Of course, the Microsoft approach is based on Intel hardware and Microsoft operating systems only. This will limit its role in many large enterprises to departmental environments. Nonetheless, many enterprises will need to accommodate interoperability with COM/DCOM platforms.
The application server is not a fad. It is a platform and a framework that can facilitate the single challenge facing many large enterprises — the achievement of E-business. IT organizations that have not already done so should immediately put in place plans to evaluate a three-tier architecture centered around application servers. They should begin with a pilot project to become familiar with the technology and the options. Once they are familiar with the technology and can visualize the place it has within the enterprise, the staff should begin to define an architecture and a set of requirements that are specific to the environment. When they get to the point of evaluating alternative products, special attention should be given to adherence to standards, scalability and fault tolerance, and support for the back-end systems within the enterprise’s infrastructure.
As shown with the National Discount Brokers and Vodafone examples, organizations should plan for success when they are architecting the three-tier environment. It is not uncommon that, once rolled out into production, the demand for E-business and E-commerce systems doubles or triples in a very short timeframe. This increased demand can be easily accommodated if the staff architects a system, up front, that can scale smoothly and in a linear fashion. Another key to being able to adapt and grow a system is to implement standards wherever possible so that new services and new components can be easily implemented as required. This includes knowing a vendor’s commitment to the continued support for new standards. As CORBA and J2EE evolve, it is important to select a vendor that has a firm commitment to the continued implementation of standards, as opposed to vendor-specific and proprietary extensions.
Once the architecture is in place, IT organizations will find that they now have an environment that is incredibly flexible and powerful. As demonstrated in the Honeywell Aircraft Landing Systems example, organizations can dramatically cut their application development costs and lead-times by using a distributed object approach leveraging the rich services of application servers. They will also have a system, as demonstrated by FoliQuest, that can be seamlessly integrated into a wide variety of different environments due to the widespread support for standards and interoperability. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, organizations of all sizes, in all industries, and in any locale can realize the goal of achieving E-business. New organizations such as BuildPoint Corporation can be created to accomplish E-business; and established enterprises such as Cable Wireless HKT can transform their existing customer service processes while simultaneously slashing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. By setting in place a three-tier, distributed architecture based on application servers, IT organizations can literally transform all of the key business processes of the enterprise and, at the same time, leverage the pervasiveness and the power of the Internet.
Notes
1. http://www.iplanet.com/solutions/customer_profiles/ndb/index.html.
2. http://www2.sofiware.ibm.com/casestudies/swcsweb.nsf/customername/F542555943BCCF070025683A0005F827.
3. 3. http://www.iplanet.com/solutions/customer_profiles/hktelecom/index.html.
4. http://www2.software.ibm.com/casestudies/swcsweb.nsf/customername/Cl116B143828BED500256943001C49B7.