Corporate.Net Web Middleware Glue Binds Web Apps KIVA Enterprise Server We liked KIVA Enterprise Server's pure Web orientation--it's strictly for HTML-based clients--and its ability to explicitly group a set of related Web pages into a transaction. In the lab, the TP monitor did a decent job of distributing transactions across multiple servers, and we discovered that Enterprise Server ensured transaction integrity--albeit just for Web applications--as well as the other middleware products did. When we suddenly removed a server from the network, Enterprise Server automatically (and correctly) failed the transactions that depended on the presence of the downed server. If you're planning a Web-based development effort with no ties to legacy systems, we suggest that you give KIVA Enterprise Server a close look. KIVA is a relati ve newcomer to the middleware market. The company designed its Enterprise Server product specifically as an application server environment for Web-based business applications. Thankfully, it carries no extraneous functions for supporting pre-Web technologies. KIVA's middleware wor ks with Java-capable Web browser clients and supports both Java and ActiveX. We found Enterprise Server, like the other products in this review, consists of a transaction and request manager, several APIs for programmatic control over transaction-processing activities, a security module, administrative tools, a deployment manager and a data access manager. The transaction and request manager relies on state and session information to manage multistep, complex requests as atomic transactions. The administrative tools gave us a graphical interface for managing distributed application components and transactions in a run-time environment. We noted the security module can use cookies, database access controls, Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL), Secure HTTP and HTTP challenge-response authentication, and it creates an audit trail of transactional events. Enterprise Server has six service classes: transaction management, application and server management, system services (such as load-balancing), thread management and application partitioning, data access and application logic management. KIVA's implementation of these service classes is modularized, so you can easily configure them to run on one or several distributed machines. For the sake of performance, Enterprise Server is multithreaded and it includes caching and streaming functions to minimize response times. In tests, the load-balancing feature smoothly doled out transaction requests to application programs running on multiple networked computers. Web developers who build applications based on Enterprise Server can program in C/C++ or Java. KIVA offers a separate software developer's kit, containing C/C++ and Java class libraries, sample applications, a set of application assista nts (wizards) and technical documentation. We built a Java program with the kit, and the only stumbling block we encountered was familiarizing ourselves with the behavior of the class libraries. We used the deployment manager within Enterprise Server to package the components and modu les for installation on each of the servers. Enterprise Server works with any Web server that offers the Internet Server API (ISAPI), Netscape API (NSAPI) or Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming interfaces. It has native support for Oracle, Informix, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2 databases and other data sources that are Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant. Enterprise Server runs on Microsoft NT Server, SunSoft's Solaris and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP-UX platforms. On NT, it requires a 486 or newer processor, 16 MB of RAM and 20 MB of free disk space.

For a look at the Transparency of Middleware Internet Rx by Chris Lewis The Dawining of the Age of Java Management by Bruce Boardman Updated May 12, 1997