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An application server is basicaly what its name says:
it is a server for applications. An application requests something from the server, and
the server will carry out its request. The type of requests and their functionality differ
from one server to another depending on the needs required from the server. Radical Computing's Application Server provides the following
three key features to applications on a network:
security management
flow
control
data
retrieval
Some of the capabilities offered by the server are:
- application tracking and access logging
- user profile and preference maintenance
- user groups for defining group privileges
- group supervisors for maintaining groups
- define user access to applications and different
controls within an application
- define flow control for the different applications and
different users
- Winsock compliance
- connections to popular database servers
- query maintenance and SQL-statement storage
- transaction management
- data caching for queries
- direct access to dBase and Paradox files for local data
storage
- ODBC access
- ability to handle all data manipulation requests to the
database servers
- handling distributed data (multiple databases and other
application servers)
The benefits of using the Application Server include:
- restricting application access to authorized users only
- within an application, allow authorized users only to
access certain menus or controls
- allow for centralized security administration as
opposed to having the security features built into an applications itself, thus making it
much easier to maintain
- create flexible and modular applications whose flow
control is dynamically defined on the application server. This allows applications to
behave differently for different users, based on their privileges
- facilitate distributed database connections
- setting up multiple application servers reduces network
congestion to the database server
- since the server handles query maintenance, then an
application needs only access a query by its name, regardless whether it's an
SQL-statement, file access, DLL call, OLE, etc.
- reduces the user license requirements for the database
server since database queries are handled by the application server
- flexibility in distribution of functions and data
- create applications which are not dependant on
particular database servers
- allows for the creation of extremely thin client
programs since most of the functionality and business logic is stored in the application
server, not the client
- transaction management ensures integrity across
multiple databases
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