Test Environment
Client: Dell Precision 410, 128MB RAM, 18GB disk drive,
Windows NT Workstation 4.0 SP 5
Persistence Software, Inc.
1720 S. Amphlett Blvd. Third Floor
San Mateo, CA 94402-2701
Phone: 650 372-3600
Fax: 650 341-8432
www.persistence.com
Pricing:
Persistence licenses PowerTier on a concurrent developer basis at $7,500/ developer. The server is licensed on a runtime basis at $25,000/CPU for both NT and UNIX platforms, and site licenses are available.
Many Internet sites and applications began life as simple static Web pages. Once developers gained some initial experience working with the Web, these same applications went from being static pages to dynamic applications. In response, a host of dynamic application servers emerged in the marketplace, many of them featuring their own proprietary languages that were derivatives of HTML tags.
These application servers, a natural progression from classic three-tier computing models, could be plugged directly into your favorite Web server - an added attraction. Recently, this same market has begun to coalesce around JavaSoft's J2EE SDK as the standard backbone for application server engines. The J2EE framework evens the playing field between the large vendors and the smaller ones since they're both working from the same basic model. I recently got the chance to take a look at Persistence Software's PowerTier 6 Transactional Application Server - a hot entry in the application server race.
Installing and Configuring PowerTier
You can download PowerTier 6 from Persistence Software's Web site after you fill out a short qualification form. The installation procedure itself is relatively straightforward, but you'll need to do some postinstallation work. After the server is installed, you must run the PowerTier Profile wizard that verifies the overall configuration environment for you. I found the wizard helpful for pointing out problems, but it wasn't very helpful in terms of actually diagnosing the problem. Persistence runs a public news forum on its Web site and it seems like quite a few developers have had trouble with the configuration. There's quite a lot of functionality bundled into the package so I'm not surprised. Once you get the configuration issues out of the way, it's a relatively simple matter to get rolling with PowerTier 6. Persistence provides a thorough tutorial on the product and this document includes a simple diagram that highlights the development model with PowerTier 6 (see Figure 1).
Building a Simple Project
You can start designing your application with the PowerTier Object Builder or you can use PowerTier with Rational Rose. Persistence provides a link program for working with Rose version 4.0 and Rose 98. (The version on the Web site doesn't support Rational Rose Enterprise Edition 2000 per se, but I was able to use the link program with 2000 anyway.) To get the two products working together you have to make some manual changes (such as copying Rose menu files), but it's relatively easy to do. The PowerTier export procedure builds a PowerTier project file from the model within Rose. Using the default Rational Rose model of a banking application that PowerTier provides, I made some changes to the attribute definitions, then generated the project file.
