Chapter 9. Software Infrfastructure

with Lutz Wrage

Lutz Wrage is a visiting scientist at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

In people's handling of affairs they often ruin things when they are right at the point of completion. Therefore we say, "If you're as careful at the end as you were at the beginning you'll have no failures."

”Lao-Tzu, Te-tao Ching

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

”Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks ,
2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1988, p. 254.

Software infrastructure consists of middleware and supporting services and standards that simplify the development of enterprise information systems. Middleware allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact. Middleware is essential for migrating mainframe applications to client/server applications and for communicating across heterogeneous platforms. This technology evolved during the 1990s to support three- tier architectures.

In this chapter, we discuss Enterprise JavaBeans, an emerging and important technology for enterprise information systems and an essential component of the target architecture for the RSS modernization effort. We then discuss message-oriented middleware and, in particular, the IBM MQSeries implementation of this model. Also covered in this chapter is the Java 2 Enterprise Edition architecture, which incorporates both of these technologies, as well as others. Finally, we discuss XML messaging technologies used in business-to-business and application-to-application integration ”also an essential component of the RSS target architecture. If you are already familiar with these technologies, you may wish to proceed to the next chapter.