Lutris EAS as a WEBM Platform
By Keith Bigelow, Lutris Technologies
Network and systems management vendors wish to
implement applications that support WBEM standards such as CIM, XML, and
HTTP. Java is an ideal language for management applications, as it offers
excellent cross-platform portability and deep support of XML and HTTP.
As vendors consider Java, they are also investigating application frameworks
with the richest possible feature set in order to achieve a faster time
to market. J2EE is a potential launching point for this application development.
Companies developing highly transactional eCommerce
applications have found J2EE to be an ideal platform for accelerating
application development. Unfortunately, the J2EE model is ill suited to
the requirements of network and systems management since Servlets and
EJBs do not support application behaviors such as scheduling, polling
(for CIM, SNMP or CMIP agents), notification, workflow and other long-duration
transaction programming models. The challenge is to leverage all of the
rich services of J2EE, without being restricted by the limitations of
J2EE's request/response programming model.
Since 1995, Lutris Technologies has developed
Java middleware and distributed computing and management solutions. In
mid-2000 Lutris began the design of Lutris EAS, a fault tolerant enterprise
Java application server. The Lutris EAS architects understood the strengths
and limitations of the J2EE programming model, and created a services-based
architecture that enabled a modular "plug & play" extensibility
of the platform to support non-J2EE services and alternative programming
models. While this design was underway, Lutris architects were also implementing
the first open source Java CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) at the Storage Networking
Industry Association website (http://www.snia.org).
Lutris engineers have imported CIMOM as a service
within the Lutris EAS application server, and have developed additional
systems management capabilities such as scheduler and polling services.
The Lutris EAS Services Architecture enables the CIM, polling and scheduling
services to automatically gain access to the security, management, database,
and logging services of the platform, and seamlessly share transactional
contexts with other applications and services running on Lutris EAS. The
incorporation of CIM, polling, and scheduler services within the Lutris
EAS J2EE application server creates an ideal platform for authoring and
deploying portable network and systems management applications.
In Lutris EAS, developers have a scalable, unified,
standards-based platform that adheres to WBEM and J2EE application development
specifications. This platform dramatically reduces the time to market
for ISVs building systems management applications, and allows ISVs to
focus their resources on application innovation built on top of the robust
infrastructure services of Lutris EAS.
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