Log-based middleware server recovery with transaction support

Abstract Providing enterprises with reliable and available Web-based application programs is a challenge. Applications are traditionally spread over multiple nodes, from user (client), to middle tier servers, to back end transaction systems, e.g. databases. It has proven very difficult to ensure that these applications persist across system crashes so that "exactly once" execution is produced, always important and sometimes essential, e.g., in the financial area. Our system provides a framework for exactly once execution of multitier Web applications, built on a commercially available Web infrastructure. Its capabilities include low logging overhead, recovery isolation (independence), and consistency between mid-tier and transactional back end. Good application performance is enabled via persistent shared state in the middle tier while providing for private session state as well. Our extensive experiments confirm both the desired properties and the good performance

Fault-tolerance for stateful application servers in the presence of advanced transactions patterns

Replication is widely used in application server products to tolerate faults. An important challenge is to correctly coordinate replication and transaction execution for stateful application servers. Many current solutions assume that a single client request generates exactly one transaction at the server. However, it is quite common that several client requests are encapsulated within one server transaction or that a single client request can initiate several server transactions. In this paper, we propose a replication tool that is able to handle these variations in request/transaction association. We have integrated our approach into the J2EE application server JBoss. Our evaluation using the ECPerf benchmark shows a low overhead of the approach.

Component replication in application servers

Three-tier middleware architecture is commonly used for hosting large-scale distributed applications. Typically the application is decomposed into three layers: front-end, middle tier and back-end. Front-end ("Web server") is responsible for handling user interactions and acts as a client of the middle tier, while back-end provides storage facilities for applications. Middle tier (' Application server') is usually the place where all computations are performed, so this layer provides middleware services for transactions, security and so forth. The benefit of this architecture is that it allows flexible configuration such as partitioning and clustering for improved performance and scalability. On this architecture, availability measures, such as replication, can be introduced in each tier in an application specific manner. Among the three tier described above, the availability of the middle tier and the back-end tier are the most important, as these tiers provide the computation and the data for the applications. This thesis investigates how replication for availability can be incorporated within the middle and back-end tiers. The replication mechanisms must guarantee exactly once execution of user request despite failures of application and database servers. The thesis develops an approach that requires enhancements to the middle tier only for supporting replication of both the tiers. The design, implementation and performance evaluation of such a middle tier based replication scheme for multi-database transactions on a widely deployed open source application server (1Boss) are presented.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceQUE Project, Department of Informatics, ITB, Bandung, IndonesiaGBUnited Kingdo