| Term Paper Title | Car Insurance |
| # of Words | 2364 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 9.46 |
Car Insurance
You can't see it, and it doesn't store data or calculate results. Can you live without it? Perhaps not.
Barry Nance
After a long day at work and a quick dinner, you finally get a chance to sit down and look at your mail. The bill for your car insurance arrived today, and it seems too high. Since it's early evening, your agent isn't available to give you a quote from a different insurance company. You don't want to wait until tomorrow because you're afraid you'll forget by then. Perhaps the Internet can help.
Visiting the Web site of the Car and Home Insurance company (CHI), you click on the Car Insurance Quote button and enter some basic information about yourself and your car. In a short time, you see that you can indeed save some money. You click on the Yes button, follow the instructions on the screen about where to send a check, and then fax a note to your agent, saying that you've switched your coverage.
You weren't the only visitor to CHI's Web site at that moment. In fact 1000 other people concurrently strained the capacities of CHI's 20 Web servers and 10 database servers as they looked for a way to save money. You all saw quick response times because CHI used a transaction-processing (TP) monitor -- specifically, Microsoft's Transaction Server -- when it designed its Web-based insurance-quoting application.
Transaction Server is software that doesn't help you enter data, nor does it store any data or calculate results. And yet you would be hard-pressed to implement a large, complex client/server application without using a product like it. Middleware -- the category of software that includes Transaction Server -- ensures transaction integrity, balances application work loads across multiple servers, and enforces appropriate, secure access at the application and transaction levels.
To explore Transaction Server fully, I developed a hypothetical car-insurance-quoting application and exercised it in an intranet environment. The application has all the essential ingredients for use with a TP monitor: three-tier architecture, the need to synchronize database updates, a thin-client presentation layer, and the potential for high-volume access.
In general, the experience taught me that multiple-server distributed applications absolutely require middleware -- without it, developing large-scale applications is a horror show. I also discovered what makes Transaction Server in particular a worthwhile package and also stumbled across a few of its shortcomings. For example, before you can use Transaction Server, you must first render your application's business logic as an ActiveX component. Once you switch to (and learn) ActiveX, however, declaring transactions within Transaction Server and then at run time -- letting it manage those transactions -- is painless.
Requiring NT Server 4.0 and only 32 MB of RAM, Transaction Server integrates nicely into organizations that have already decided to use Microsoft products. Mixed-platform environments, such as those using Oracle's database manager, have more work to do or must wait until Microsoft makes Transaction Server work with more database managers, languages, and platforms.
Why Bother with Middleware?
Middleware helps you build high-volume business applications that can run on several applications servers and update multiple database servers. Thousands of clients, through a battery of Web servers, might use such applications simultaneously. Business-logic analysts and programmers have neither the time nor the expertise to create the transaction-oriented, network-based architecture these applications require for everyday use -- they have enough work to do automating business procedures and rules.
Middleware, and TP monitors in particular, give programmers the plumbing -- the intra-application network linkages and services -- that enables a distributed application to service a large number of clients. A three-tier application (with separate presentation, business-logic, and data storage) is a prime candidate for the sort...Read entire document
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