Apple WebObjects 5 - Manual (Page 22)

22 The WebObjects Advantage
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Apple Computer, Inc. January 2002
C H A P T E R 2
What Is WebObjects?
Modular Development
The power of WebObjects comes from a tightly integrated set of tools and
frameworks, facilitating the rapid assembly of complex applications. At the heart of
this system is Project Builder, an integrated development environment (IDE) that
manages your Java business logic and tracks all the supporting models and
components. As mentioned above, WebObjects also includes powerful assistants
and frameworks that allow the rapid creation of HTML or Java Client applications
directly from the database. Advanced developers can tap into the Java APIs
underlying WebObjects’ frameworks, allowing virtually unlimited customization
and expandability.
Pure Java
WebObjects applications are 100% Pure Java, which means they can be deployed on
any platform with a certified Java 2 virtual machine.
Scalability and Performance
Static websites and traditional client-server applications have one strong suit: they
both leverage the power of the client platform, minimizing the load on the server. It
doesn’t take all that much processing power to serve up a set of static Web pages.
Dynamic Web applications, although a tremendous advance over static pages,
require additional server power to access the dynamic data and construct the Web
pages or Java Client user interface on the fly.
The WebObjects application server is both efficient and scalable. With WebObjects,
if more power, reliability, or failover protection is needed, you can run multiple
instances of your application, either on one or on multiple application servers (see
Figure 2-4 (page 23)). You can choose from one of several load-balancing algorithms
(or create your own) to determine which application instance each new user should
connect to. And, either locally or from a remote location, you can analyze site loads
and usage patterns and then start or stop additional application instances as
necessary. Load balancing is a very powerful feature of WebObjects that allows you
to add more server capacity as the need arises without needing to implement a
load-balancing algorithm yourself.