Transacting On the Web

As the Web grows and we rely on it more, Web TP monitors make it more reliable.

John Montgomery

It's been a long time since the Web has been about flat, read-only browsing. It's now as likely that you'll buy a book or make a plane reservation as read today's news. And even reading today's news can be an excursion through dynamically generated Web pages. All this means that the Web is increasingly relying on applications. Some of these are enterprise-class applications that handle thousands of users each day.

Therein lies a huge problem. Although many companies are starting to rely on Web technologies to run their businesses, much of the technology underlying the Web wasn't intended for large-scale client/server computing, with all its associated demands of consistent perfo rmance and high reliability. In other words, we're building enterprise-scale applications on a decidedly unenterprise-scale foundation.

Fortunately, help has arrived in the form of Web componentware. It could be a Java applet in a browser talking to a database on a server. It could be an ActiveX application on a server generating Web pages on the fly. But the key is that some part of the connection between you and the information you're after is written to a component standard such as ActiveX, JavaBeans, or Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).

But the big problem with Web components tends to be managing them: That they start when you need them and close when they're done, and that their load gets distributed evenly across multiple systems. Transaction-processing (TP) monitors can balance loads, queue requ ests and responses, isolate processes, verify rights and permissions, and, most important, recognize which HTTP messages belong to which transaction, thereby creating state in an otherwise stateless architecture.

Microsoft made a big splash in 1997 with the introduction of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), an ActiveX-based component coordinator. Integrated into Windows NT, MTS manages a pool of ODBC connections that clients can draw from, thereby reducing database load. MTS is now a part of Microsoft BackOffice, Windows NT Server, and Internet Information Server (IIS).

Microsoft is hardly alone. BEA is a company on the forefront of Web TP monitors, with products such as Tuxedo and Jolt. Tuxedo is BEA's distributed transaction monitor. It provides load balancing, security, and other features you'd expect from a TP monitor. IBM's Transaction Server provides similar features but includes close integration with Lotus Notes, as well as with IBM's message-queuing product, MQSeries. Kiva's Enterprise S erver is another TP monitor, but it was designed for the Web.

As we grow to rely more on the Web, we must make it more reliable, and TP monitors look like one of the best ways to do that in 1998.

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Where to Find

BEA

Sunnyvale, CA
Phone:    408-743-4000
Internet: 
http://www.beasys.com



Kiva

Mountain View, CA
Phone:    650-526-3900
Internet: 
http://www.kivasoft.com




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As the Web Evolves

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Object technology will enable a rich worldwide transaction environment to propel electronic commerce.

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BEA and Kiva in 1998

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AT A GLANCE: Web transaction-processing monitors will enable Web applications to be more reliable and scalable.

WHO SUPPORTS IT: Microsoft, BEA, IBM, Kiva.