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Application Servers Tie It All Together
JULY 1998

A new crop of application servers is emerging to pull business functionality onto the World Wide Web, even if the business logic was created years ago in legacy applications.

This breed of application servers uses Java, Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) software compliance and enterprise Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from Sun Microsystems Inc. to retrieve data and business logic wherever it may be and integrates it into a new application for the Web.

Still, setting up an application server is complicated, and building applications that draw on many sources requires a great deal of programming skill, says Nick Gall, an analyst at Meta Group Inc.

Many products called "application server" are primarily deployment platforms for content authoring or application building tools. They're not general-purpose integration platforms, Gall says.

Nevertheless, application servers "represent a fundamental change in the way the Internet is being used," according to a Zona Research Inc. report issued last month. They change the Web from information publishing to "interacting with customers' choices, fetching data from internal corporate resources and even joining data from different resources before presenting it to the user," the report says.

Bluestone Software Inc., Kiva Software Corp. - which was acquired by Netscape Communications Corp. in December 1997 - and NetDynamics Inc. led the way over the past three years, opening a pool of connections to database servers to be shared by browser users.

Now Apptivity, a unit of Progress Software Inc.; Novera Software Inc.; Oracle Corp.; Sun Microsystems Inc.; and WebLogic Inc. are extending this connectivity beyond the database server.

Foremost among their attributes, these application servers represent a way "to extend existing corporate applications to a new class of browser-based users," the Zona Research report says.

Novera includes a mainframe "wizard" on its Jbusiness server that works in conjunction with Symantec Corp.'s Visual Cafe or other third-party development tool to capture 3270 dumb terminal screens from a mainframe session. It then can translate them into a Java format for browsers, says David Butler, a Symantec vice president.

"The Web application server can act as a plastic surgeon for old green-screen applications," the Zona report says.

WebLogic Chief Technology Officer Paul Ambrose says first-generation application servers still rely on starting up Common Gateway Interface scripts, which themselves start and stop applications, as a time-consuming way of managing applications. WebLogic and other Java-based application server vendors rely on the ability of their servers to recognize enterprise APIs in Java programs. Enterprise APIs provide a way for applications to be distributed around a network and still be found by the application servers.

A module of code built to the specification of Microsoft Corp.'s Common Object Model, used in Windows programming, can be treated as a JavaBean by WebLogic's Tengah and exported to a client, Ambrose says.

Zona Research Inc. can be reached at www.zonaresearch.com

Bluestone Software Inc. can be reached at www.bluestone.com

Kiva Software Corp. can be reached at www.kivasoft.com

Netscape Communications Corp. can be reached at www.netscape.com

NetDynamics Inc. can be reached at www.netdynamics.com

Progress Software Inc. can be reached at www.progress.com

Novera Software Inc. can be reached at www.novera.com

Oracle Corp. can be reached at www.oracle.com

Sun Microsystems Inc. can be reached at www.sun.com

WebLogic Inc. can be reached at www.weblogic.com