EA Server

I've been posting about Powerbuilder a lot lately. The PB application, I work with currently is actually an n-tier application written in PB, Java and JSP. The application is built around a middle tier from Sybase called Enterprise Application (EA) Server. It's also called Jaguar (which is actually a part of the EA Server). A quick search for EA Server in google brings up Electronics Arts page, a gaming site. Search on Jaguar brings up all kinds of other things. So, there is not a lot of help on EA Server, though Sybase's own site has a wealth of information on the product. In my current project, we rely on EA Server for all our business rules and multi-tier application support. I am learning about the product in an effort to improve our architecture and thus our application performance. I will my share my experiences here, so it can benefit others trying to learn or use the product.

EA Server is an Application Server like Oracle Weblogic, IBM Websphere, JBoss etc. It is a Java container like all others mentioned. EA Server is a full blown Java server, so it supports Servlet, JSP, EJB and JMS. Apart from that, it has a speciality of being able to run PB objects as well. With support for CORBA (IIOP) and COM (on windows machines) components, it enables PB developers to develop application modules in PB, Java, C++ that can talk to each other through CORBA. For e.g., we have a site built using JSP pages that "talk" to PB objects. Recently, I developed a wrapper in Java for PB classes, so our Coldfusion applications can use PB objects as well. With this setup, we are able to implement an n-tier application in various languages.

While researching the issues and figuring out new methods to improve our Server performance, I realized how powerful the server is. I currently work with EAS 5.5. The latest version is 6.4. In 6.x, Sybase rearchitected the product completely to be more Java centric. To be able to do that, they included a Jetty Java container and wrapped each PB object as a J2EE object, so everything runs as Java objects. I haven't tried this version yet, but it sounds interesting. Unfortunately, from what I heard, Sybase (SAP) is thinking of getting rid of this completely in a few years and re-architect PB support into SAP's Netweaver server. So, really the knowledge about EA Server may disappear in a few years. (This is exactly what happened to Forte! Is it my luck or what?).

Irrespective of the fate of the EA Server, I believe the techniques learned in this exercise will be useful with other servers as well. I am already, trying our web app in Apache Tomcat which can then connect to our PB objects running in EA Server. I will share these experiences here as well.  So, if you are interested in EA Server or writing n-tier in PB or even how to make PB talk to Java components usingCORBA, please check back in.