Design & Architecture
Enterprise Portal Schematic
Our Enterprise Portal uses the internet as a base, on which it provides a platform that enables an enterprise to connect and integrate its entire universe of databases, applications, etc. It supports open standards including XML Web Services, as defined the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). It also supports standard protocols such as SSL, http, https, IIOP, SOAP, SMTP, and languages including Java, Java Script, Html, EJB.
Our J2EE architecture-based solution also makes it possible to leverage Sun Microsystems’ Sun ONE, or “standards-based vision, architecture, platform, and expertise for building and deploying services on demand.”
Although our Enterprise Portal uses J2EE technology, our J2EE development environment uses NetBeans and Eclipse, which are both open-source based J2EE compliant systems. For application servers we use JBOSS 4.0, the only application server that has passed SUN's J2EE 1.4 specifications.
For databases, our Enterprise Portal can be implemented using any of the following: PostGre SQL, Oracle, or MS SQL. For Operating System (OS), our platform neutral solution can be deployed on Linux, Mac or Windows. Our entire higher education deployments, which include over 40 ASP hosted institutions, are on Linux.
There are three architectural tiers of our Enterprise Portal, which are explained below:
- The Client tier represents everything that is seen by an end user. This web-accessed tier is the first point of entry for clients, internal applications, and selected external applications, allowing these end-users to integrate or interact with the Enterprise Portal platform. This is represented in Figure 1 under the heading “Web Container.”
- The Application tier is the network architecture, which essentially runs the other tiers. It provides presentation services, business-logic services, and data-access services using various Java and J2EE technologies, including Java servlets, Enterprise JavaBean™(EJB™) technology, JDBC technology, Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI™) technology, Java Management Extensions (JMX) and Java XML technologies. This is represented in Figure 1 under the heading “Services Framework.”
- The Data tier is the infrastructure needed to host and provide data gathered by the client and application tiers. This is done using technologies such as Sun (StorEdge™), Veritas, and Oracle, and is represented in Figure 1 under the heading EJB Container