Enterprise Solutions provide for a scalable, easy to manage programming solution to providing business management and information accessibility for internal and external clients. Enterprise solutions deal with the problem of providing information to clients both externally and internally. It deals with programming and databases. The main problem being how to most efficiently get our data accessible to those we want to access it. The solution has the following characteristics and more:
- Security – Should be able to be sure information is not being stolen by those we don’t want to have access to it.
- Scalability – Should be able to accommodate an increase in clients.
- Cost – Should be easy to program.
- Management – Should provide the ability to manage the implementation including version control software and software that helps manage team effort with regard to providing the solution.
- Portable – Should be able to accommodate changes in technology.
Therefore, in order for a business to properly choose an enterprise solution, a proper requirements definition must be completed. All desired features along with priorities for each feature must be assigned in order to make a suitable decision.
APPLICATION SERVER
Enterprise solutions for implementing distributed systems generally revolve around an application server which provides several but not necessarily all of the following services:
- Directory and naming services
- Security
- Distributed transactions
- Fault tolerance management
- Load balancing and clustering
- Database services
- State Tracking
These services are generally called technical infrastructure services. There are many types of application servers that may supply some or all of these functions.
The applications that run on these application servers will receive requests from clients such as web browsers and using API program hooks will request or send information to/from other applications or through the interfaces to the specific service such as a database service. When a reply is received, the client request is responded to by the application.