Kenneth Arnes Ryan Paul Jaca Network Software Applications Networks consist of hardware, such as servers, Ethernet cables and wireless routers, and networking software. Networking software differs from software applications in that the software does not perform tasks that end-users can see in the way word processors and spreadsheets do. Instead, networking software operates invisibly in the background, allowing the user to access network resources without the user even knowing the software is operating. History o Computer networks, and the networking software that enabled them, began to appear as early as the 1970s. Early networks consisted of computers connected to each other through telephone modems. As personal computers became more pervasive in homes and in the workplace in the late 1980s and early 1990s, networks to connect them became equally pervasive. Microsoft enabled usable and stable peer-to-peer networking with built-in networking software as early as 1995 in the Windows 95 operating system. Types y Different types of networks require different types of software. Peer-to-peer networks, where computers connect to each other directly, use networking software whose basic function is to enable file sharing and printer sharing. Client-server networks, where multiple end-user computers, the clients, connect to each other indirectly through a central computer, the server, require networking software solutions that have two parts. The server software part, running on the server computer, stores information in a central location that client computers can access and passes information to client software running on the individual computers. Application-server software work much as client-server software does, but allows the end-user client computers to access not just data but also software applications running on the central server. Features y Networking software varies widely in the type and number of computers the software can support. Basic features common to most networking software solutions include user management, which is the ability to add and remove users to and from the network, and file management, which is the component of the software that allows the network administrator to define where data is stored and to define which users can have access to which sets of data. Considerations y Networking software packages vary widely in the degree to which they are easy to use and easy to manage, as well as in the relative security they provide for the data inside the network. Similarly, different software can provide support for different numbers of users, which can be a factor in choosing software if the network plan calls for rapid growth. Benefits y Networks and networking software allows many users to access a shared set of documents and in some cases to access a shared application. For example, a business may choose to operate an email server that can send and receive emails for its employees and store copies of all the email messages that each employee keeps on his personal computer. Application Server An application server is a software framework that provides an environment where applications can run, no matter what the applications are or what they do. It is dedicated to the efficient execution of procedures (programs, routines, scripts) for supporting the construction of applications. The term was originally used when discussing early client±server systems to differentiate servers that run SQL services and middleware servers from file servers. Later, the term took on the meaning of Web applications, but has since evolved further into more of a comprehensive service layer. An application server acts as a set of components accessible to the software developer through an API defined by the platform itself. For Web applications, these components are usually performed in the same machine where the Web server is running, and their main job is to support the construction of dynamic pages. However, present-day application servers target much more than just Web pages generation, they implement services like clustering, fail-over and load-balancing, so developers can be focused just on implementing the business logic. Normally the term refers to Java application servers. When this is the case, the application server behaves like an extended virtual machine for the running applications, handling transparently connections to the database at one side, and connections to the Web client at the other. Java Application Servers The Web modules include servlets, JavaServer Pages and Enterprise JavaBeans. Business logic resides in Enterprise JavaBeans - a modular server component providing many features, mostly improving application scalability. The Hibernate project offers an EJB- 3 container implementation for the JBoss application server. Tomcat from Apache and JOnAS from ObjectWeb exemplify typical containers that can store these modules. The EAServer is from Sybase inc. A Java Server Page (JSP) (a servlet from Java ² the Java equivalent of a CGI script) executes in a Web container. JSPs provide a way to create HTML pages by embedding references to the server logic within the page. HTML coders and Java programmers can work side by side by referencing each other's code from within their own. The application servers mentioned above mainly serve Web applications. Some application servers target networks other than web-based ones: Session Initiation Protocol servers, for instance, target telephony networks. Web Server is a sub set but the Application server is a super set and hence encompasses the past server information that is been stored in database .NET Framework Microsoft Microsoft positions their middle-tier applications and services infrastructure in the Windows Server operating system and the .NET Framework technologies in the role of an application server. Third-party Mono (not fully .NET compatible), developed by Novell, Inc., licensed under GPL. Base4 Application Server, an open source project TNAPS Application Server, freeware application server, developed by TN LLC, PHP Application Servers Are used for running and managing PHP applications. Zend Server, built by Zend Technologies, provides application server functionality for PHP- based applications Other Platforms Open-source application servers also come from other vendors. Examples include: Appaserver Spring Framework Non-Java offerings have no formal interoperability specifications on par with the Java Specification Request. As a result, interoperability between non-Java products is poor compared to that of Java EE based products. To address these shortcomings, specifications for enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture were designed[by whom?] to connect the many different products. These specifications include Business Application Programming Interface, Web Services Interoperability, and Java EE Connector Architecture. Advantages of Application servers Data and code integrity By centralizing business logic on an individual server or on a small number of server machines, updates and upgrades to the application for all users can be guaranteed. There is no risk of old versions of the application accessing or manipulating data in an older, incompatible manner. Centralized configuration Changes to the application configuration, such as a move of database server, or system settings, can take place centrally. Security A central point through which service-providers can manage access to data and portions of the application itself counts as a security benefit, devolving responsibility for authentication away from the potentially insecure client layer without exposing the database layer. Performance By limiting the network traffic to performance-tier traffic the client±server model improves the performance of large applications in heavy usage environments. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) In combination, the benefits above may result in cost savings to an organization developing enterprise applications. In practice, however, the technical challenges of writing software that conforms to that paradigm, combined with the need for software distribution to distribute client code, somewhat negate these benefits.[citation needed] Transaction Support A transaction represents a unit of activity in which many updates to resources (on the same or distributed data sources) can be made atomic (as an indivisible unit of work). End-users can benefit from a system-wide standard behavior, from reduced time to develop, and from reduced costs. As the server does a lot of the tedious code-generation, developers can focus on business logic. Desktop Organizer Desktop Organizer software applications are applications that automatically create useful organizational structures from desktop content from heterogeneous types of content including email, files, contacts, companies, RSS news feeds, photos, music and chat sessions. The organization is based on a combination of automated scanning of metadata similar to data mining and manual tagging of content. The metadata stored in applications is correlated based on a structure for the data type handled by the organizer tool. For example the email address of a sender of an email allows the email to be filed in a virtual folder for the author and company the author works for or a music file is filed by the musician and album label. The resulting visualization simplifies use of desktop content to navigate, search, and use related information stored on the desktop computer. The data in desktop organizer tools is normally