Java Application server based Application Registration and Management Service

Publication Summary

As we know, currently application servers are widely used in enterprise level application. An application server, in an n-tier architecture, is a server that hosts an API to expose business logic and business processes for use by third-party applications. Application server can be classified by software framework, such as Microsoft .Net framework and Java application server. Java application server may be the most succeed one. Among the better known Java Enterprise Edition application servers are WebSphere Application Server, Sybase Enterprise Application Server (Sybase Inc), WebLogic Server (Oracle), JBoss (Red Hat), JRun (Adobe Systems), Apache Geronimo (Apache Software Foundation), Sun Java System Application Server (Sun Microsystems). Java application servers are working on the J2EE standard. Though Java application server provide a lots of service in serving more and more enterprise software to deploy core applications, there’s no an existing and special service to register and manage installed application just like what we did in general operation system. Referring to general OS environment like windows and UNIX, OS will register the basic information of installed software in registration table or system files, the windows registry table is a example of this kind of mechanism. Based on these services, we can easily upgrade and uninstall installed software, or install other related software. For example, we can use register table to get version information of installed software, and then decide whether current software needs to be upgraded or can be upgraded to target level. On middleware platform, compare to what general OS support, there’s no such service which can support us to register, update and retrieve basic information of installed applications. Current, the basic information of installed application was kept and managed by different installers in OS. And in application server platform, there’s no service to store and manage these application information. Since OS and application server will not synchronize the information of installed applications, and many applications can be remote deployed to application server, we can trust the information of installed application kept in OS. If there’s a service which can support installed application to register and manage basic information of installed application in application server, it will help us a lot in install, upgrade and manage applications. In a word, this disclosure tries to provide a solution on the level of application server which enables us to flexible manage applications on the application server platform.

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Java Application server based Application Registration and Management Service

This invention describes a service and its structure which enable application server to register and manage the basic information of installed applications within application server platform instead of OS platform. So it works within application server like WebSphere. And as a general service and be flexible in being called by the third part application installers or application tools, it is reasonable to be implemented based on existing interface and techniques supported by application server .

Figure 1 illustrates the service structure within Java application server .

Repository to keep the information

of

installed application information

Java application server service

Application registry service

Application installer

App1ication upgrade

Other App1ication

Figure 1

There's many ways to implement this service in application server level, here we lists some implementation ways. They describe the implementation in different ways such as an extended application server management interface, leveraging JMS service and repository, or an independent and default installed application providing applications registration service .

The implementation way 1:

The first way is to Use JMX and EAR standard resource file to store the basic information of installed applications, and we can use JMX interface call to retrieve these information. For example, we can store the application basic information in *.ear/META-INF/METAIFEST.MF

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following up a predefined format :

Manifest-Version: 1.0

AppProductName: IBM Records Manager
AppProductVersion: 8.4
AppVendor: IBM Corporation
AppName: Records Engine
AppVersion: 8.4.00.200.03.03
AppBuildDate: 2008:08:08 08:08:08
// below entries serves for deployment under distribution environment.

AppProductDeployGroupID: XXX.com IM System Deployment Group1 AppConnectionTable:

……

Figure 2 illustrates the implementation on WebSphere ,
1. The basic information of installed application can be stored in a special file like /META-INF/METAIFEST.MF and import into WebSphere application server during installation .

2. Information in MANIFEST.MF can be retrieved via JMX by any valid user. These information can be used to make a decision on maintain strategies. We are no longer depends on the OS to do software maintains which maybe out of sync with the one running in WebSphere Application Server. And if we i...

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