ATG Dynamo Application Server

The ATG Dynamo Application Server (DAS), a standards-based, scalable, high-performance application engine, provides the system developer and application developer with all the benefits of Java including the easy re-use and portability of JavaBean and Enterprise JavaBean components.

Dynamo Application Server is designed to provide enterprises with the platform and tools required to succeed in quickly developing, deploying, and running personalized Web business sites. This market - proven, 100% Java - application server currently drives some of the busiest sites on the Web today.

Benefits:

• 100% Java, standards-based application server runs any JavaBeans, Servlets, and Enterprise
  
• JavaBeans, as well as other Java code and existing CGI code
• Full support for Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
  
• Enterprise-wide integration of Web applications and legacy systems
• Dynamic delivery of content over multiple channels with support for Wireless Application
• Protocol (WAP) support
• XML support
  
• Multi-tier failover and redundancy architecture for business-critical applications
• Proven Internet-ready performance and scalability
  
• Dynamo Server Pages enhance JavaSoft page compile and JSP standards for more power, reusability, and time-to-market advantage
  

The Challenge

As most organizations start to build their second and third generation Web applications, developers are beginning to realize the need to unify the application platform and the tools while preserving the investment in legacy applications, data, and know-how.

Products promising legacy connectivity to the Web using emerging standards like Enterprise JavaBeans hit the newswires every month, solving connectivity and productivity problems. These are often the most visible problems at hand, but such products generally fail to address the more complex issue of tying together the large number of existing services that the organization provides to customers. Such services include content-rich and highly interactive applications that span server machines and platforms, programming languages, data, and content stores and most importantly, the business units in the organization.

Through its open server architecture and support for industry standards, ATG Dynamo brings together the vast number of existing systems and large volume of content. At the same time, it provides a robust platform for new development projects. ATG Dynamo is a standards-based, scalable, high-performance application engine that provides the system developer and application developer with all the benefits of Java including easy re-use and portability of JavaBean and Enterprise JavaBean components. Dynamo also gives the system administrator peace of mind by supporting bullet-proof reliability measures such as dynamic load distribution, automated session failover, and multi-server geographic failover.

The ATG Dynamo Application Server provides a number of key features that enable companies to leverage these capabilities, including:

Full J2EE Support

ATG has licensed and implemented the full J2EE application infrastructure to provide enterprise-wide support of the industry standard for legacy integrations, transactions, distributed applications, messaging, and more. Customers can now host J2EE applications on a proven, scalable, reliable, high-performance application engine. DAS support for J2EE includes support for important specifications like EJB 1.1 and JSP1.1, Java Servlet API 2.2, Java Transaction API 1.01, Java Messaging System 1.0.2, and JDBC 2.0.

Wireless Support

ATG has implemented support for Wireless Markup Language (WML) from the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) 1.1 specification. ATG Dynamo can now serve both static and dynamic WML content to WAP-enabled wireless devices. Customers can now extend the reach of their applications across multiple channels and support the exciting new wave of wireless devices in their personalized eCommerce and relationship scenario initiatives.

Dynamo Messaging System

A comprehensive messaging architecture based on the JMS API that provides several features and subsystems to make messaging more accessible to applications and facilitates integration between ATG Dynamo and other enterprise applications. Two JMS providers (SQL JMS for distributed messaging and Local JMS for high-speed messaging) come as part of the Dynamo Messaging System.

Transaction Management

The Dynamo Server implements a transaction manager to manage and monitor transactions across transactional resources (e.g., databases, messaging systems, etc.). The transaction manager provides developers with a standard framework for implementing high -performance database applications and ensures the integrity of transactions across resources using a two-phase commit protocol.

Security

ATG has implemented a powerful and sophisticated security application programming interface that provides authentication and access control suppport for both ATG Dynamo and J2EE applications. The Dynamo Security API provides the flexibility to access and manage user security information in XML files, LDAP directory services, and SQL databases.

Session Federation

Optimized support for the live exchange of critical customer profile data between applications hosted on different Dynamo Servers and the re-use of sessions as users move back and forth between applications.

Performance, Scalability, and Reliability

Dynamo Application Server uses a state-of-the-art, patent-pending page compilation mechanism to dynamically build pages based on Dynamo Server Page templates that are tied to back-end Java components. By combining page compilation, object and thread re-use, page output caching, and a unique scaling architecture, Dynamo boasts one of the best performances in terms of raw page building. It enerates over 42,000 1KB pages per minute on a four-CPU Sparc 250MHz platform.

Adding additional Dynamo servers to handle increased load is easy. The Load Manager automatically balances load based on real load, not just round-robin or source-IP schemes across a cluster of Dynamo servers. Dynamo employs a multi-tiered approach to achieve reliability. It supports load balancing, request failover, session failover, graceful rejection of requests in case of overcapacity, and geographic failover.

The system routes all requests associated with the session to the appropriate server in order to avoid the overhead of data migration. To provide resilience for server failures, session data may be replicated on a backup server efficiently and automatically so that the session data can be recovered transparently if a server fails.