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Application servers: An introduction

Find out how this newly popular product category evolved

By Todd Sundsted, JavaWorld.com, 12/01/98

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology and built the infrastructure that would become the World Wide Web, he envisioned nothing more than a global application that would allow its users to publish and link documents without regard for location and platform.

It was a bold vision, and like many great ideas, it vastly underestimated the true utility of the World Wide Web.

With the benefit of hindsight, one may be surprised by the narrowness of the original vision. The benefits delivered by the technology underlying the Web are obvious in retrospect.

The Web is built upon a family of simple, robust, nonproprietary protocols. The HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP (which overlays a number of more complicated transport protocols), unifies communication between clients and servers. The Universal Resource Locator, or URL, solves the difficult problem of uniquely identifying resources and data on a widely dispersed network without centralized control and organization. The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) provides a presentation layer that is lightweight and independent of the client platform.

These characteristics made the World Wide Web and Web technology the ideal catalyst for a set of trends that had been developing in corporate computing circles for a number of years.

Web technologies could easily replace limited, expensive, proprietary tools and protocols for sharing information over the corporate LAN with robust, open protocols and tools. This was the beginning of the corporate intranet.

Then, with the intranet in place, Web technologies provided a platform that enabled users with desktop machines to access the information and resources present on legacy systems. Tools that began as simple, Web-based reporting front-ends for legacy databases quickly grew in functionality until they were capable of integrating multiple back-end systems under a single interface. HTML made this step possible. HTML made the activity of designing attractive, lightweight user interfaces relatively painless. And the resulting screens were both portable across client platforms and free of the problems that often came with distributing and updating traditional client code.

Beyond the bounds of the corporate intranet, the World Wide Web allowed companies to bring these applications to remote users without the trouble of a dedicated wide-area network (WAN) or dialup connections. More importantly, the ubiquitous nature of the World Wide Web, and the now-universal nature of the protocols and technologies upon which it was built, made it possible to extend these same corporate applications out to suppliers, partners, and customers.

Where did application servers come from?

The family of tools that we now call application servers is the result of two originally independent lines of development that converged atop the World Wide Web.

One line of development begins with Web site development tools.

The first Web applications were built with handmade tools. They were developed as needed and written in C, C++, Perl, or whatever else happened to be available. These handmade tools eventually gave way to the first integrated Web development tools. Integrated tools sported fancy user interfaces, streamlined the generation of HTML, and added rudimentary back-end integration. The heirs to this line still maintain the family resemblance. They tend to provide a rich development environment and generate high-quality, dynamic user interfaces but provide weaker support for enterprise application integration.

 

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