Netscape Application Server-- Overview of the Netscape Application Server

Administration Guide
Overview Guide
Installation Guide


Introduction
The World Wide Web offers organizations a cost-effective vehicle for delivering business applications to employees and customers. Companies that want to deploy their next-generation business applications on the Web can obtain the following benefits: Ubiquitous access to information and business processes Improved customer service Timely access to critical information Increased customer control Unified access for internal and external customers through one common business platform In addition, today's business environment is rapidly evolving. This requires applications that can be quickly deployed, easily enhanced, and efficiently managed. Key Requirements for Web-based Business Computing In order to deploy robust applications over the Web, the Web solution must deliver on the following key requirements for business-critical computing: Transaction management capabilities Scalability High performance Robustness Security Shortcomings of the Web for Deploying Business Applications The World Wide Web lacks the infrastructure required for the robust deployment of business applications. Alone, Web servers do not provide the capabilities needed for robust business applications and have the following shortcomings: Lack of Transaction Management Capabilities and Stateless Environment No Model for Application Scalability Unpredictable Performance Under Heavy and Varying Loads Difficult Application Deployment and Management Lack of End-to-End Security These deficiencies have thus far limited the widespread deployment of robust business applications over the Web. Lack of Transaction Management Capabilities and Stateless Environment The World Wide Web is an inherently stateless environment. Web protocols, such as HTTP, do not maintain session state and are not transactional protocols. Complex, multi-step operations that occur from page to page are lost after each Web link or page is traversed. Each time a user makes a dynamic request, such as a request that initiates a CGI script, previously collected information is lost. The stateless nature of the Web demands new solutions to efficiently handle transaction-based requests. No Model for Application Scalability Applications need to be upwardly scalable as the user base grows with the business. In the current Web architecture, an application designed to run on a single server may become unusable as the Web server capacity proves insufficient to handle an increasing request load. Additionally, in many current Web architectures, servers delegate processing duties to other available servers in a round-robin DNS lookup. Without regard to the specific resources needed to process the request, the application will be inefficiently utilized and have lower performance. Unpredictable Performance Under Heavy and Varying Loads The World Wide Web offers access to a global audience and a large number of users. The nature of the customer base is often unpredictable, and applications can be swamped with a huge number of concurrent user requests. Wide variations in traffic volume result in slow response times and application performance degradation at peak hours. For example, performance drops quickly in an application that processes user requests sequentially and starts a new CGI program every time it receives a new request. As a result, today's Web solutions are required to make investments in large server capacities to handle the peak loads. For the off-peak loads, those servers are significantly under-utilized. Difficult Application Deployment and Management Rapidly evolving applications require robust management facilities to ease management in a distributed environment. Today's Web tools do not offer the capabilities necessary to efficiently manage business applications over the Web. Large-scale deployment in a rapidly-evolving environment using today's Web tools involve much overhead when distributing, maintaining, and enhancing applications. Additionally, with a CGI-based Web solution, application components can be difficult to manage, and CGI scripts must be maintained individually and redundantly among all servers. Lack of End-to-End Security Applications require protection against unauthorized access to sensitive data. Although SSL and SHTTP protocols protect the transfer of data between a Web browser and Web server, additional features must be built into applications to ensure security from the Web browser to back-end data sources.