What is Middleware? Application Servers

[Music] welcome to what is middleware my name is John Brunswick and we're going to look at application server capabilities what's an application server and what value could a standardized application server provide to organizations to do this we're going to look at two fictional communities we're going to look at the community of middleware fields where Jim manages all of the building maintenance and operations we're also going to look at code away valley where bob manages all the building maintenance and operations now Jim and Bob are good friends and they go out to a coffee periodically this last week Bob said Jim I don't get how you guys do it in middleware fields you've such a small team but you have such a large community over a coda way Valley we got started really quickly with all of our different buildings we rapidly grew our community using the resources that we had at the time and for every structure we did something a little bit different sometimes just to expedite the process if the plumbing or the electrical needed to be a certain way we just got it done but we're really hitting a wall right now because all of our time and energy is spent maintaining all these different types of structures how did you guys avoid this at middleware fields Jim said at the beginning we thought to ourselves what would a consistent foundation across all of our buildings look like what common services could we have for any building that we're creating so we thought about things like electrical water telephone the ability to receive mail and to connect to the Internet how are we going to secure the doors of our different buildings because we developed this blueprint early on we were able to build over and over again using the same skill set with the same staff when something went wrong in any one of our building structures we knew how to fix it because it was done in a consistent format now on top of this we even thought about things like disasters in our community and because of that middleware fields actually uses a redundant power grid to supply power to all of our different buildings so within the enterprise an application server does a lot of things similar to the foundation that Jim described when we think about running things like our Human Resources systems web portals running our financials it all runs within an application server the application server has a common set of services just like Jim's buildings in his community did we have things like security a consistent way to handle transactions within our applications we have the ability to connect to web services and other network services to make sure that our applications can communicate with the web and other systems in addition to that we might want to store information in databases as many applications do so our application servers have the connectivity to do that inherently now we also understand that a lot of applications are very critical and so we want to make them available even in the event of disasters so just as Jim had a redundant power grid we have capabilities like clustering within application servers this ensures that if some hardware fails or a part of an application fails that services can continue to run for our business users now along with that the system inherently has diagnostic capabilities to help people track down and resolve issues so whenever we're developing enterprise applications this foundation allows us to focus on things that provide value to the business and differentiate our business instead of struggling with delivering these core services what we'll see in subsequent episodes of what is middleware is how we almost have prefabricated homes that can go right onto the foundation that Jim described this gives us the ability to extend those capabilities even further and that wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for this foundation this has been what is middleware application server capabilities you

Channel: John Brunswick

Views: 174,196

Rating: 4.3766232 out of 5

Keywords: Middleware, application server, jee application server, j2ee application server

Id: 3D7jftA_-ko

Length: 4min 49sec (289 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 17 2013