PowerTiers 6's PowerPage @ JDJ

Persistence Software, Inc., recently released the latest version of its EJB server, PowerTier 6. It's a little different from your run-of-the-mill EJB servers, though. This JavaOne 2000 special-edition issue of EJB Home will enlighten you about PowerPage, a hot feature that will put PowerTier 6 on every EJB evaluator's radar!

Let's first understand why PowerTier 6 and PowerPage are such key ingredients in any large-scale, e-commerce solution today.

The E-Commerce Dilemma
My company has worked with numerous dot-coms this year, and most have puzzled over the same dilemma: How do we deliver a scalable, Web-enabled application, using standards-based technologies, in "Internet time"?

Four key items need to be addressed in what I call the e-commerce dilemma:

1. Scalability
2. Web enabling
3. Standards-based technologies
4. Internet time (time-to-market)

Tackling an e-commerce application generally involves give or take among these four items. For instance, maybe you decide to build a scalable, standards-based application, but it'll take an extra two months to get it fully functional and performance tested. Or maybe you opt for scalability and time-to-market, and choose a proprietary solution to reach your product deadline successfully. How do you address all four concerns and still make an e-commerce application in record time? There's an answer to this dilemma, and it's called PowerTier 6.

PowerTier 6 to the Rescue
Two critical elements are key to solving the e-commerce dilemma:

• An EJB server for deployment of e-commerce components
• Model-driven development and code generation

PowerTier 6 is a feature-packed application server that delivers both elements to solve the four key items of this dilemma.

Meeting the Scalability Criterion
Building on top of its original patented caching technology for scalability, the PowerTier 6 EJB server meets the scalability demands that e-commerce application and high-traffic sites require. Around 90% of the traffic on the Web is browsing (i.e., read only). PowerTier's shared cache provides a means to read EJB data at in-memory speed rather than disk speed. PowerTier 6 caches often-browsed data, improving the speed at which useful information is returned to the consumer. Timeliness enhances users' experience and prevents them from surfing to another site while waiting for responses from your Web application.

PowerTier's EJB server not only takes advantage of its patented caching, it also supports load balancing and fault tolerance of servers and EJB components.

Meeting the Web-Enabled Criterion
Persistence Software recently acquired 10BaseJ and incorporated its ServletMill product into the PowerTier 6 application server. ServletMill is written entirely in Java and includes support for Java Servlet API 2.1 and a JavaServer Pages (JSP) engine that is compliant with Sun's JSP specification 1.0.

The PowerTier servlet engine, like its EJB server, is highly scalable and fault tolerant. It can run a servlet in several "zones," which are essentially clusters of servlets. Zoning provides scalability by routing user activity across zones, ensuring that no single servlet engine is overloaded with requests. Also, ServletMill can fail over the state of a user's HttpSession. Fault tolerance in the PowerTier servlet engine is implemented by saving additions or updates to sessions on a shared file system. When a zoned servlet fails, another servlet retrieves the session state and continues processing the request.