Tutorial: Application Servers and associated technologies

Abstract

Application Servers (ASs), which have become very popular in the last few years, provide the platforms for the execution of transactional, server-side applications in the online world. ASs are the modern cousins of traditional transaction processing monitors (TPMs) like CICS. In this tutorial, I will provide an introduction to different ASs and their technologies. ASs play a central role in enabling electronic commerce in the web context. They are built on the basis of more standardized protocols and APIs than were the traditional TPMs. The emergence of Java, XML and OMG standards has played a significant role in this regard. Consequently, I will also briefly introduce the related XML, Java and OMG technologies like SOAP, J2EE and CORBA. One of the most important features of ASs is their ability to integrate the modern application environments with legacy data sources like IMS, CICS, VSAM, etc. They provide a number of connectors for this purpose, typically using asynchronous transactional messaging technologies like MQSeries and JMS. Traditional TPM-style requirements for industrial strength features like scalability, availability, reliability and high performance are equally important for ASs also. Security and authentication issues are additional important requirements in the web context. ASs support DBMSs not only as storage engines for user data but also as repositories for tracking their own state. Recently, the ECPerf benchmark has been developed via the Java Community Process to evaluate in a standardized way the cost performance of J2EE-compliant ASs. Several caching technologies have been developed to improve performance of ASs. Soon after this conference is over, the slides of this tutorial will be available on the web at the following URL: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/mohan/AppServersTutorial_SIGMOD2002_Slides.pdf.