Master File: Serving Up Apps

As organisations add Internet and Web layers to their existing networks to improve communications, the need to integrate existing applications and make them available to customers, suppliers, vendors and employees becomes vital. This middleware march, thus, has popularised component-based application servers among IS managers. But are you being served seamlessly?

The nagging never seems to end. As an IS manager you're always under pressure from apparently insatiable user departments in your organisation and from customers who may be anywhere at the end of a browser to create program applications in response to their demands. With networking now commonplace in the corporate environment, this challenge translates into finding simpler ways to manage complex, distributed applications.

The solution lies in a capable new breed of application servers (app servers, in short). These Web-supporting products not only disentangle the sharing and processing of your business and application logic, they also connect your front-end applications to back-ends such as legacy and distributed systems, and databases. They can be dynamically linked to disparate data sources. And app server products are becoming important in the e-business integration environment.

No wonder the demand for app servers is expected to soar. According to research firm Ovum Inc., the global market for app servers and services will be $17 billion (Rs 82,200 crore) in 2004, up from $251 million (Rs 1,200 crore) in early 2000.

App servers expand the scope of what you can do with your business. Suppose you're an insurance company selling policies over the Internet. A standard Web server may be able to support your basic user interface and application logic, perhaps to the extent of taking demographic information and placing initial orders. But it won't help you in enforcing complex eligibility rules, or in connecting with your existing systems that have the business logic necessary to actually set price, approve and generate the final policies. This gap is the domain of app servers.

App servers come in a broad spectrum, from massive "enterprise" app servers that take care of your complex business logic and transactions to nimbler app servers that are virtually cousins of the pure and simple Web server. These may pack in a Web server, manage your clients and perform load balancing and other functions.

All application servers, whatever their mission, sit between your back-end database servers and your frontline users. Think "middleware" and you get a good idea about what application servers do. Essentially, they connect database information (usually coming from a database server) and the client program (often a Web browser with a user looking at it).

There are many reasons for having a tough go-between here. One may be to shrink the size and complexity of client programs. Another could be to control the data flow for better performance. You may also want to provide security for both data and user traffic.

What's more, today's multi-function app servers not only serve to take the user request burden off your shoulders, but they also allow your elderly client/server applications to co-exist with new-generation, multi-tier, Web-based applications, regardless of the target client type.

The typical app server has evolved from the era of client/server computing and LANs (local area networks). In the early stages, they were part of "tiered" applications: two-tiered (database and client program), three-tiered (database, client program and app server), or n-tiered (all of the above plus whatever).

This mess got straightened out when the Internet became a universal computing backbone. The Internet and the Web have drastically altered the perception of business, and new technologies have stepped in to support this paradigm. These specifically include Web servers, firewalls, browsers, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

Since the Web is essentially three-tiered (database, client program and Web server), managing data along with application functionality with a Web philosophy has suddenly become a driving need, and an accepted standard.

So how can you get the best out of the new wave of app servers as they become the heartbeat of your sprawling distributed network?

Rightsizing your app server requirement can save you a bundle. Gartner (the technology research agency) has significantly pointed out that vendors touting high-end app server technology have caused organisations "to dramatically and unnecessarily overspend" on solutions they do not need.

Gartner says companies worldwide have overspent about $1 billion (around Rs 4,800 crore) on app server technology since 1998. Further, the researcher predicts that companies could waste $2 billion (Rs 9,600 crore) more by 2003. This has been excellent for app server vendors, but terrible for technology implementers.

To prevent companies from overspending, Gartner suggests that when purchasing and implementing app server technology, companies should check their technology inventory to make sure they do not already have the capability in an existing product or a free product.

You could start by looking at how program development is getting new muscle with testing, debugging, modelling and workflow technologies that could ramp up your productivity. There are Web-based tools that help you squeeze business logic from outdated formats and semantics. Even your dusty COBOL program or Windows client, for example, can now be shaken down for their essential logic and redeployed as an object.

Your goal is to study the software anatomy of app servers, and pull together the skills for creating business objects and turning your existing applications into components. This is harder than just searching for specific tools, though that will at least tell you what the market and vendors have to offer.

Bombay Stock Exchange

BSE's Kalpana Maniar: Integration of disparate application systems is the key

In 1999 the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) decided to take trading to the Web. For this, it needed a robust and scalable application environment, integrate seamlessly with legacy applications and inter-operate with other environments from different vendors. It chose BEA Systems as its software partner.

For the BSE's Internet Trading System, business logic was developed using Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). These applications were then clustered to run on the BEA WebLogic 5.1 app server for load-balancing. The BEA Tuxedo 6.5, meanwhile, gave the BSE's Internet Trading System the capability to closely monitor all transactions.

The challenges of this project included spanning the integrated environment across multiple servers, configuring the platform for high availability and at the same time ensuring security. To achieve these, the trading system was integrated with BOLT's (BSE On-Line Trading system) back-end systems, which ran on Tandem servers.

Kalpana Maniar, general manager, business development, BSE, says, "BEA was selected because of its capability to integrate with numerous systems, like the Tandem, which we used for our database, to ensure message integrity within the application. Also, the product has a remarkable capacity for rapid scaling, load balancing, reliability and performance."

-R. Srinivas

Tarang Software Technologies Ltd

Tarang Software's Kannan Kasturi: Reaping benefits with app development tool

Bangalore-based software development company Tarang Software Technologies Ltd feels an app server with its development tool, known as an application development environment, is important for delivering goods to clients effectively and efficiently.

Tarang Software has tried most app servers that are available on the market, like IBM's WebSphere or BEA's WebLogic, and also the India-developed Pramati app server. "For a software development house, the app server with its development tools are important. We found Pramati's Visual Studio, a development environment, to be very good. It is based on pure Java and EJB and caters to all servers," says Kannan Kasturi, chief technology officer of Tarang Software.

Tarang Software has a mobile app server, based on Pramati's Visual Studio as the platform. "Based on client requirements, we custom-build the mobile application server on any application server using Pramati's development tools," says Kasturi.

Most IS managers understand the need for Web-based applications, and app servers play a vital role in this process. But investments in this arena depend on IS managers who have to choose between branded and new products, feels Kasturi. "If IS managers ask only for quality and not for a branded product we bundle our applications with Pramati's server and sell it to them," he says.

-K. Jayadev