The KITE Application Server Architecture

An application server represents a framework for server applications, which are programs that provide an API rather than a GUI and allow remote access to their functionality. The architecture of the Java-based application server KITE results from a generalization of the single-user desktop operating environment Oberon essentially by turning the global module list into a data structure associated with a particular client. We therefore introduce the notion of a Service as a named set of functions with state, the notion of a ServiceContext as an extensible set of service instances, the notion of a ContextFactory as the foundation for servers and clusters and the notion of an Application as a set of available services. We describe how these concepts are mapped onto the programming language Java and we discuss the fundamental implementation techniques being used. We also present a short overview of the available infrastructure, which is needed for using KITE in a production environment. Finally we compare our approach with Enterprise