Hello all,
Briefly, my question is not specific to Tomcat. I'm looking for answers
generally related with application servers, and tomcat user list is one
place really experienced and nice people exist.
Here it goes...
We are at the first steps of a big (well, for us it is big) project. On our
part, there will be a database server (probably Oracle or DB/2) which
probably will have to be capable of handling more than 1,500,000
transactions per day coming from POS machines all around the country.
Current infrastructure is based on mainframes and they are expensive to
maintain as you know.
We won't be dealing with X25 to TCP/IP or other low level POS related
networking things. Those are considered as "outside world" for us. Here is a
text diagram showing what we think for now:
|
| +----------+ +----------+
| | Server 1 | <----> | |
| +----------+ | |
| . | |
POS | +----------+ | Database | Report
machines | | Server 2 | <----> | Server | <-- stuff
(X.25) | +----------+ | | (internal)
| . | |
| . | |
| +----------+ | |
| | Server N | <----> | |
| +----------+ +----------+
|
Servers will operate the business logic; is message consistent, is it a
debit or credit, has owner enough credit, what type of smart card is used,
etc etc. At this point I was thinking an application server can do it well
enough (scaling for incoming connections, database connection pooling,
managibility, etc.) But, as far as i know incoming connections are not HTTP.
So, is it logical to use an application server to implement those "business
logic units"? I think we need to implement, say POSServlet classes from
generic Servlet interface. Has anyone seen or developed something like this
before? Or is it better to implement servers with ServerSockets? I don't
like the latter because imo, we need to "reinvent" a lot of things.
I hope I explained the case well. I'm waiting for advices.
Best regards.
/tb.
