Software Project Management in Practice
| There are several different approaches to integrating distributed enterprise applications. Typically they involve a high-speed network software bus operated by a transaction server such as BEA Tuxedo. A full discussion of transaction servers is beyond the scope of this book. To simplify our discussion, we focus on a mobile location service solution developed using Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Why Java on the Server? [1]
There are many reasons to consider using Java on the server. It's a Better Third-Generation Language (3GL)
Java is a simpler 3GL than C++, but still provides the necessary capability to scale to solve large problems. Programming in Java can be much faster than programming in C++. With improvements in computer processing power and distributing computing, it is better to take advantage of the reduced development time than the potentially faster run-time. It's a Better Fourth-Generation Language (4GL)
Java has been designed to be very easy to extend to reusable, high-level business abstractions. Because Java is also object oriented, it can be better suited to encapsulating business logic than a traditional fourth-generation scripting language. Ubiquitous
Java has a massive developer community and industry support. Java's portability is an additional advantage when it is necessary to support multiple operating environments. Robust
Java is also very robust, and can considerably reduce time to market. Unlike C and C++, Java does not provide direct access to memory locations (pointers), so memory reference errors, which are hard to diagnose and debug, are rare. Memory leaks are also rare in Java applications, due to the language's automatic garbage collection feature. Strong Network Support
Because Java grew and developed with the Internet, it is not surprising that it has very strong network support. Java's network facilities allow high-level business object abstractions to be passed by value, allow you to change an object's underlying representations without breaking remote applications, support the ability to load new functionality with standard bytecodes, and provide distributed garbage collection. Component-Oriented Computing
Java's component-oriented computing model allows applications to be developed with data independent of business logic and business logic independent of presentation logic. This flexibility to reuse components makes development efforts with Java better able to support distributed development teams and long- term code changes. It Is Fast
The performance of Java compared to native-compiled third-generation languages has improved significantly. It is important that in a distributed business application, only a small portion of the processing time is spent on business logic. The remainder is split between the database management system and the network. What Is a J2EE Application Server? [2]
The J2EE specification states a set of minimum characteristics a J2EE application server must exhibit. These characteristics are delivered to your mobile location services infrastructure before you even begin to build. These minimum capabilities of any Java application server are described in the following sections. Easy to Develop and Can Deploy Distributed Java Applications
A Java application server provides the structure and environment to facilitate building well- formed applications. In addition, the Java application server provides the systems infrastructure and management tools for deploying an enterprise application. Scales to Permit Thousands of Cooperative Servers to Be Accessed by Tens of Thousands of Clients
Application servers are designed for scale. Preparing an application for deployment in an application server environment might be more complex and time consuming in the short run, but is well worth it in the long run. To deliver on scalability, an application server provides the following:
Provides an Integrated Management Environment for Comprehensive View of Application Resources, Network Resources, System Resources, and Diagnostic Information
When substantial revenue and brand equity relies on consistent and high-quality service delivery, it is important to have instant access to robust monitoring and management tools. This suite of tools allows you to watch unchecked exceptions, logs, threads, sockets, network connections, and access control lists. You might want to supplement an application server's management environment with additional tools, but it is not efficient to develop your own suite of management tools. It is important that vendors for different components of your location services infrastructure (such as positioning and spatial analysis) provide systems feedback in accordance with standard monitoring tools such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Remote Monitoring (RMON). This data should be aggregated and monitored using a product such as HP Openview, CA Unicenter, or IBM Tivoli. Transaction Semantics to Protect Integrity of Data Even as It Is Accessed by Distributed Business Components
Because the application server environment is built to scale, a facility needs to be available to allow data to be processed in a transaction processing model with commits and rollbacks . This prevents data from being corrupted and overwritten, and systems from getting out of sync. Provides Secure Communications, Including SSL, Access Control Lists, HTTP, and IIOP Tunneling to Communicate Across Firewalls
Security is a key component of any application, and is especially important in an environment that will have thousands or millions of users. Poor security and security breaches shake confidence in your user base. A Java application server provides capabilities to operate from behind a firewall, support for various authentication systems including encrypted certificates, and encrypted communications such as SSL. Application Server Architecture
All application servers are divided into at least three logical layers : the presentation layer, business logic layer, and data access layer (see Figure 3.2). As discussed earlier, a good application server product also has a systems management and reporting interface. A code level discussion of how these components operate is beyond the scope of this book. Figure 3.2. Simple J2EE Application Server Architecture.
Presentation Layer
The objective of the presentation layer is to decouple the actual user interface design and implementation from the specialized business logic of your mobile location services development process. For rapid development with minimum errors, it is most effective to have specialization. Java Servlets and JSP
The Java servlet model is a special set of Java classes that excel in processing requests and creating responses. This model was developed with the generation of HTML Web pages transported across Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) in mind. Because HTML is related to the XML specifications, this process works equally well for applications that communicate using WML, VXML, GML, or any other proprietary XML specification. In addition, servlets are not limited to supporting the HTTP protocol ”it just happens that it is the most common. The team responsible for developing your user interface will often include people such as graphic designers, user interface specialists, and others. These people often do not have 3GL programming experience, and because servlets are 3GL Java code with graphic elements embedded in them, it can be difficult for your design team to work with. To solve this problem, Java server pages (JSPs) were developed. Java server pages are XML documents that contain tags that embed Java code in the document. When the servlet engine initializes, the JSPs are compiled into a servlet and behave exactly as a servlet from this point on. This allows your design team to operate independently on perfecting what the user will see while the presentation logic developers focus on piecing together business logic into an application and dynamically generating the user interface. Business Logic Layer
Similar to the presentation logic layer, the objective of the business logic layer is to partition development work into manageable, reusable, and discrete components. Just as the standards used by the presentation logic team to deliver content to clients (WML for WAP phones, VXML for voice browsers, HTML for Web browsers, and specific XML formats for specific XML clients), it is necessary to have a framework and standards for the server-side business logic so the presentation logic team can use the business logic team's tools and services. Business logic should be concerned with application issues such as solving domain-specific problems and should not be concerned with system issues like managing transactions or security enforcement. Application servers provide you with a documented and proven infrastructure with a standard framework and interface for developing your business logic. This is the goal of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). According to the EJB specification, the goals of the EJB architecture are:
EJBs
Enterprise JavaBeans are Java components that implement business logic. EJBs reside within EJB containers that are stored within the EJB server of the application server. A sample EJB environment is shown in Figure 3.3. Figure 3.3. Sample EJB Environment.
Leveraging standard components of a transaction server, the EJB server provides a number of immediate benefits to the EJB developer:
Because EJBs are based on a component model, they operate within a specific environment and its interactions are governed according to a specific set of rules. There are three types of EJBs: session beans , which implement a client/server conversation and are typically found managing business process or workflow; entity beans , which represent persistent business objects such as CustomerAccountInformation ; and message-driven beans , which allow clients to asynchronously invoke server-side business logic. In a mobile location services application, session beans might include the following:
Entity beans might include the following:
Data Access Layer
An application server's data access layer provides a number of facilities to connect legacy enterprise information systems (EIS), from a relational database to a mainframe transaction processing system. This provides better management and session support than a simple socket. Although some application servers have specially tuned interfaces for proprietary systems, most have also a generic connector for the integration of the proprietary interfaces more commonly found in positioning and spatial analysis products. This is known as the J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA). J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA)
The JCA architecture enables an EIS vendor to provide a resource adapter that can be plugged in to an application server to provide the underlying infrastructure necessary to integrate with the EIS. The application server and EIS resource adapter collaborate to keep all the systems level components transparent from the application components. JCA defines a set of system and application contracts. The application contract defines the client interface that the application uses to communicate with the EIS. The most commonly used client interface is the Common Client Interface (CCI), but a proprietary interface could also be used. The system contract is specified in the EIS vendor's resource adapter. In many ways, a JCA resource adapter operates in a similar way to a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver. In fact a JDBC driver is one example of a resource adapter. The difference is that the adapter is not limited to connecting a database using SQL. The adapter can connect to any type of EIS and use any protocol to communicate with the EIS. Commercial Application Servers
Commercially available application servers appropriate for mobile location services include the IBM Websphere Everyplace Server (http://www.ibm.com), BEA Weblogic Server (http://www.bea.com), Oracle 9iAS (http://www.oracle.com), Microsoft Mobile Information Server (http://www.microsoft.com), and the freeware Jakarta Tomcat from Apache (http://www.apache.com).
[3] 2001 James Dunn. Additional Server Sizing Resources
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