Chapter 15 -- Administering a Service Application on the Web

Chapter 15

One of the most important parts of a service application is its ease of administration. No matter how much you like the way a service application functions, you're going to have problems if it's difficult to administer. Using the Web to administer an application can give your server-based application an edge on the competition.

There are several ways to communicate with a service application over the Web. Let's take the MonitorService network monitoring application from Chapter 14 as our example. First, much of the application is table-driven. You can modify those tables to change the behavior of the application.

A second way to interact with the service application over the Web is to create a process on the Web server that uses some of the techniques outlined in Chapter 12. Recall that MonitorService from Chapter 14 created two worker threads to interact with TCP/IP clients . These worker threads allow an application to call into the service and request information or change parameters. I'll discuss this process later in this chapter.

Modifying the tables that drive the application is a task best suited to Active Server Pages (ASP) scripts, covered in Chapter 9. These server-side scripts can contain VBScript code that has access to server-side components. These components allow easy access to data sources through Active Data Objects (ADO). ASP has the advantages of being flexible, relatively fast, and available on Internet Information Server (IIS), which is included with Microsoft Windows 2000 as well as several other platforms. The slight disadvantage with ASP is that it is a script that is interpreted at run time. This feature has some performance implications. Since scripts contain the source code for the application, they might not be appropriate for some commercial applications. A developer might not want an application's source code distributed to customers. You can mitigate this problem somewhat by encapsulating crucial business logic in server-side ActiveX components, as demonstrated in the HTMLUtil example in Chapter 9.



Inside Server-Based Applications
Inside Server-Based Applications (DV-MPS General)
ISBN: 1572318171
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1999
Pages: 91

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