Architecture

App Services Switch
App Services Switch enables programs to communicate quickly, reliably, and securely across LANs, WANs, and the Internet. App Services Switch handles communication protocols abstracting the network interfaces from the applications, guarantees delivery of messages.

The App Services Switch enables highly reliable, secure and persistent communication, while still using HTTP and SOAP. Applications use Client Plugs to connect to the App Services Switch and access business services. All the communication between the Client Plug and the Switch are in SOAP format. The data within the SOAP message is application dependent and can be of any format, such as binary, XML or text with delimiters. The business functionality is exposed to the applications as remote method calls.

The Switch provides different levels of guarantee for the transactions depending upon the client's request. Messages can either be logged to a database, or to the memory or not logged The Switch ensures that the transactions are processed once and only once.

Apart from the request/response transactions, the Switch supports the sending notifications to the registered clients. Notifications are transactional messages send to a targeted user. Applications will be able to subscribe for a specific topic. The applications can publish messages for a specific topic. The Switch delivers the published message to the subscribed users.

Client Plugs
Using a Client Plug, any application can communicate reliably and securely with services made available over the App Services Switch. The eTops Client Plugs are available for the Browser, Windows applications, Java applications and applications running on PocketPC devices. Client Plugs are available as a COM component, a Dynamic Link Library and as a Java class Library. An existing application can use any form of the Client Plug to communicate with the Switch

Interface Adapters
When applications make request to the Switch, the request is converted it into the message format understood by the service and is forwarded using an appropriate Interface Adapter. Adapter to technologies such as COM, EJB, CORBA and to applications like MQSeries, MSMQ, and Tuxedo are available.

App Services Manager
App Services Manager is a complete end-to-end application management and deployment. It is an application delivery framework that lets an organization to deliver client applications incrementally instead of one large monolithic application.