Search our
entire site
Enter your search
terms below, or visit
our search page

Web App Servers -- This New Class Of Middleware Is Speeding Application Development And Becoming A Strategic Platform For Web-To-Legacy Integration

DECEMBER 1998

Web application servers are all about speed. The speed at which corporate development teams deploy new business solutions. The speed required to alter strategic applications as competitive needs dictate. The speed at which online applications process customer requests.

The popularity of the Internet and the ubiquity of Web servers have fostered a new breed of distributed applications. These solutions are quickly becoming strategic computing platforms that are driving new business activities. The Web application server links Web, client-server, and host applications, and ensures optimum application performance.

Sun Microsystems' chief operating officer, Ed Zander, says the application server is the most exciting enterprise technology since the relational database. Clearly, he's not an unbiased observer; Sun acquired application server maker NetDynamics Inc. in July.

But many corporate development managers concur. Norwest Mortgage Corp., for example, uses IBM's WebSphere application server to capture more loans and increase business volume, says David Rae, a Norwest systems architect. Norwest deployed a self-service Web application that lets mortgage brokers instantly qualify high-risk mortgages.

"We're getting data directly from a broker's computer, which we combine with credit data," Rae says. The data is then fed into a custom-developed rules engine that assesses the application. Loan processing time has been reduced to about a minute.

Why the sudden surge of interest in application servers? Electronic-commerce applications, for starters. For many IT shops, building Web-based E-commerce and supply-chain applications means assembling applications by creating new business objects, which are typically written in Java and run on a server. Application server software provides the middleware connections between Web clients and existing server components that represent application data and business logic.

Tactical Approach

Application servers address three key issues. The first is the development environment. Corporate developers need a way to create new components and integrate existing ones. The second issue is application integration. The corporate computing environment is heterogeneous, combining legacy applications and new multitier applications. Developers need an environment that lets them bind these things together, effectively creating new applications that are greater than the sum of their parts. The third issue is application deployment. Typically, Web applications are widely distributed, with components running on different servers and large user communities accessing them. These applications need a deployment platform that can effectively scale and offer consistent performance as usage increases.

An application server provides the middle tier between a Web server speaking HTTP and a database or legacy application. While traditional Web servers are good at displaying static data and providing rudimentary database access through applets and plug-ins, a more complex software engine is required to combine data from multiple sources and generate multipart transactions. That's where an application server comes in.

Web servers alone don't provide the necessary horsepower to drive transaction-heavy distributed applications to hundreds or thousands of users. An assortment of protocols and APIs is often needed to provide the necessary hooks to extend existing applications and generate new ones in a Web-centric computing environment. An application server is a protocol and interface engine that supports a multitude of industry standards such as the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol for communications; JDBC and ODBC for database connectivity; and Corba, Microsoft's ActiveX, and Sun's Enterprise JavaBeans object models for distributed application processing. Most application servers also perform Web state and session management, load balancing, and other types of application performance tuning.

Some application server vendors are also combining integrated development environments, meaning that corporate developers can build, link, and deploy Web applications from a single platform.

Unfortunately, there's still some disagreement about what constitutes an application server. No two commercial products are exactly alike (see "Guide to Application Servers," p. 8A). But one thing IT shops and vendors agree on is that an application server is more than a tool to connect databases to Web pages. Application servers should also have a range of additional functionality such as built-in communications, E-mail connectivity, and collaboration capabilities. Even so, the definition of an application server differs depending on whom you talk to.

According to analyst Martin Marshall of Zona Research, the Web application server stands between back-end data such as legacy applications and browser-based users on the front end. It retrieves and caches information, processes business logic, and unifies disparate islands of computing in the enterprise. It can also call on other Web application servers, either for specialized functions or to team up to provide scalability for high-volume application processing, he adds.

The application server gives a corporate development team the flexibility to roll out new applications quickly without recreating the plumbing that links the browser, Web server, and database for each program, says H.B. Taylor, a systems analyst at the Quaker Oats Co. Quaker is using Allaire Corp.'s Cold Fusion application server and development environment to build an application that presents information from Oracle, Sybase, and Access databases to Web clients, and also allows data entry from the production floor.

"The structured aspect of Web technologies makes it very easy to start with a small application and progressively roll out larger pieces of it," Taylor says. "The first application of our new system was done in four months. The systems we developed three years ago took a year. These technologies help us become more responsive to business demands."

The Web model of application deployment is also helping companies minimize client support requirements. Oil giant Chevron Corp. simplified the deployment of application components among its mobile sales force. "Our goal was to deliver everything in a browser to minimize ever having to write applications for the client or rely on software that has to be installed on the client," says David Reese, a Chevron software engineer.

Chevron created a sales-force automation application using Sun's NetDynamics Application Server. Not only did the application cut IT support requirements, "We gave sales reps the ability to look at their profitability and turned a process that took 30 days into a 24-hour turnaround," says Reese.

Applications deployed in a middle-tier environment are also easier to manage even when dealing with site-wide changes. Chevron realized this last December, when it deployed an application that handles invoicing, price changes, and electronic funds transfers with customers. The application server version of the application replaced a client-server system based on Microsoft Access running over a value-added network.

"The programming staff has not had to deal with maintenance or production support as they've gone up from one user to 120," Reese says. "Instead, we're focused on adding value in our code and to the business. We're able to implement 50 changes to the application in a matter of months because we're not mired in support. Before, we were in the software distribution business. That's not what Chevron wants. We want to sell oil and gas and ease communication with our customers."

As Chevron's example illustrates, application-server technology is also well-suited to the iterative nature of application development. By standardizing on a common middleware framework, developers can quickly and consistently make changes in business applications. Quaker Oats also came to that realization. "If our customer expectations change, we are able to make the change, test it, and roll it into our production environment in just a few minutes," says Quaker's Taylor. That's very important in the current business climate, he adds.

The application server market can best be characterized as a lot of different products and companies with many different heritages converging on the same marketplace. The application server market is both emergent and convergent. It's emergent in that the application server is not yet clearly defined. And it's convergent in that vendors such as BEA Systems Inc., with its M3 (code-named Iceberg) object transaction monitor; SilverStream Software Inc., with its visual application development environment; and Persistence Software Inc., with its object-relational mapping expertise; are all addressing corporate application server requirements from their own different outlooks.

Even though the application server market is relatively new, it's quickly consolidating, with products being acquired by established vendors, such as Netscape's acquisition of Kiva, Sun's purchase of NetDynamics, and most recently, BEA's planned takeover of WebLogic. These vendors are all expected to integrate the Web application server into their existing product lines, offering an integrated approach to Web application development, deployment, and integration.

There are six technologies that are being combined into a single middleware platform: Web server; database and legacy access middleware; object request broker; transaction monitor; and network services, such as directory-, security-, and message-oriented middleware, says Steve d'Alencon, Oracle's marketing VP for the application server division. "Application servers are going to become the de facto application deployment platform because they provide all the plumbing required to build a distributed application," he says.

"Most customers have islands of automation," says David Dewan, VP of product strategy at application server maker SilverStream Software. Companies have automated sales and manufacturing, but the computer systems don't work together. Application servers facilitate that connectivity in a standard way without requiring the IT department to write custom code, Dewan says.

Boston Edison Co. has created a new Internet application that streamlined the process of installing meters on customer sites. The Wiring Management System created with Cold Fusion lets wiring inspectors-spread out across 40 cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts-go to Boston Edison's Web site and input wiring permits online-which, in turn, updates Boston Edison's host-based work-management system.

"We can't install meters until the municipal wiring inspector in each city inspects the work of the electrician and we receive a permit," says Gary Clancy, work-management systems manager at Boston Edison. Before the deployment of the online application, Boston Edison received permits by mail, fax, courier, and even by phone. These documents were processed manually and put in to the work-management system. This became a customer-service nightmare when permits were not received on time.

While their very nature decrees that application servers are both development and execution environments, some vendors have chosen to give customers the freedom to choose their own favorite development tools. However, there is something to be said for the one-stop-shopping approach.

Secant Technology Inc., a relative newcomer to the application server camp with a couple of years of consulting experience under its belt, provides an infrastructure that supports the development of large multitier systems. Its product, Secant Extreme Enterprise Server, provides a complete set of system-level services for building large application server systems.

"Customers don't want to be in the business of figuring out how to integrate different systems together," says Kenny Rubin, Secant's chief operating officer. "If you're a business programmer, the last thing you want to do is to dip into the system-level services and figure out how that stuff should work." Rubin predicts that by the middle of next year, there won't be many vendors selling middleware separate from a development environment.

Along those lines, Vision Software Tools Inc. is raising the level of abstraction for developers and business analysts, combining the development environment with a Java application generator. Vision's Jade Business Logic Server combines RAD, a Web application server, object-oriented middleware, legacy data integration, and a business-rules engine. It lets developers build applications by defining business rules instead of having to write procedural code, says Manish Chandra, Vision's senior director for marketing and product strategy.

But piecing together technology building blocks is still what a lot of corporate application development is about. Take Xerox Corp.'s PeopleNet human resources application, for example, which uses two different application servers-Oracle's Application Server and Persistence Software's PowerTier for C++.

PeopleNet is a self-service system that lets employees access personal data. The Oracle database application had been in use as a client-server system for four years, says Jim Johnson, a Xerox system architect. This past year, the Visual Basic client interface was written as a browser application, but the same server logic remains in use.

The Oracle application integrates with the legacy payroll and other host applications. The client is an HTML and Java client, and Corba is used to update information to the database.

Xerox uses use Oracle's Application Server to generate all the dynamic HTML and all the Web pages that are the foundation of the whole system. The application server lacked Corba support, so Xerox turned to Persistence to take all the Oracle objects-tables, views, stored procedures-that are needed for interactivity and create a Corba object for each element.

Adapt Or Die

While confusion continues about what constitutes an application server, the market is rapidly consolidating. The caveat for IS shops is, choose what best fits your specific needs. The market will no doubt decide the best combination of features for the application server.

Adapt or die seems to be the business model for the millennium. And application servers are making it possible for companies to quickly synchronize their development and integration efforts with their business needs. Ultimately, it all comes down to speed.