Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 07/21/08 issue

Tools for Web 2.0

As agencies expand their use of the next generation of interactive Web applications, they might need to upgrade their enterprise application servers

By Maggie Biggs, Special to GCN

THE WEB — and, more specifically, Web application serving — is entering a new era.

New infrastructure options enable better capacity on demand and built-in disaster recovery mechanisms. Improvements in routing requests, caching and virtualization help improve performance. And a plethora of new functionality at the application and Web services layer will allow agencies to construct frameworks that simplify extensibility.

The bottom line: Recent improvements in enterprise application server (EAS) technologies mean its time to consider upgrading your EAS capabilities.

An enterprise application server essentially is a platform that implements a programming model, such as Microsoft .Net, Java Enterprise Edition and others, and delivers applications to client computers. The EAS market has already been through its adolescent phase, which will make adoption choices simpler. The market leaders are all well-known heavyweights: IBM’s WebSphere, Oracle’s eponymous application server, BEA’s WebLogic, Microsoft’s .Net-based platform, and Red Hat’s JBoss.

Nevertheless, recent changes in the marketplace will affect specific deployment decisions for agencies and departments. For example, Oracle’s recent acquisition of BEA might prompt agencies using WebLogic to reconsider their EAS strategies. Agencies must, in short, factor in the changing EAS marketplace and the advanced features and functionality now emerging.

Whether installing for the first time or migrating to new EAS environments, agencies are finding positive results. For example, the Army’s Surface Deployment and Distribution Command recently migrated its Global Freight Management system to an EAS environment.

The GFM system supports roughly 6,800 users across about 1,000 locations. The GFM system had been running on 10 subsystems on proprietary application servers.

Taking a measured approach, two architects migrated the system to seven EAS servers supporting the 10 applications. “The migration went so smoothly and so quickly [that the] users don’t even know we’ve made the change,” said Dianne Constable, GFM program manager and chief of the Surface Cargo Systems Branch.

GFM’s successful migration can be attributed to a phased approach. “We’re big on uptime so we migrated one server at a time,” said Hal Mann, the Army’s government technical team lead for the project. “This allowed us to have both environments running simultaneously so we could roll back if things didn’t work — but that didn’t happen.”

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, IT Management, Software Applications, Web Strategies