Section F.1. Capabilities

F.1. Capabilities

Application servers provide facilities to support the creation of applications quickly and reliably using industry-standard best practices. They also provide facilities to operate and manage these applications in a reliable manner.

F.1.1. Presentation Management Facilities

Presentation management facilities include the following:

Template support

Allows the creation of templates for various presentation views.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) support

Allows the separation of development related to presentation from that related to business logic in an application. Application servers support this standard application design pattern to manage complexity and allow division of labor during application development.

F.1.2. Session Management Facilities

Session management facilities include the following:

Session persistence and failover support

Allows support of many current users in an application, as well as graceful recovery if the application crashes

F.1.3. Administration, Configuration, and Diagnostic Facilities

Administration, configuration, and diagnostic facilities include the following:

Load balancing and clustering support

Allows deployment of applications across multiple servers, and the ability to support a larger user base without changing the application code.

Debugging and logging framework support

Provides facilities to debug and log application use and error conditions, and helps with bug fixes and other application improvements.

Subsystem monitoring and management

Allows individual components within applications to restart, without having to restart the entire application server. This helps with releasing new versions of applications without incurring an outage.

F.1.4. External Systems Integration Support

External systems integration support includes the following:

Database server integration

Allows database connection pools and object-to-relational-mapping tools.

Integration with external systems

Allows for industry-standard integration technologies such as messaging systems and web services.