Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS)
Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) delivers the plumbing for multi-user server applications, including transactions, scalability services, connection management, security contexts, and point-and-click administration. This provides us with an easy way to build and deploy scalable server applications, and to build single-user components that can be made multi-user merely by hosting them in MTS. MTS also provides a security context for the components that it manages, which enables the components to run in a required security context regardless of the security context of the client.
We'll be looking at MTS in detail in Chapter 5, and we'll use it within our case study to support the activities that form our Business and Data tiers.
In Windows 2000, MTS has been consolidated with COM into COM+, a unified programming model that we discuss in a moment.
Internet Information Server (IIS)
Microsoft's Internet Information Server/Services (IIS) enables the development of Web-based business applications that can be extended over the Internet or deployed over corporate intranets. Internet Information Server integrates with MTS and ASP, and this integration has introduced a new concept to the Internet—transactional applications.
We'll be using IIS (or one of it's close relations PWS) in Chapter 17 when we Web-enable our case study.
Active Server Pages (ASP)
Active Server Pages (ASP) is the critical technology for server-side scripting in Microsoft's web strategy. This technology is used to create and run dynamic, interactive Web server applications, and we'll make extensive use of ASP when we Web-enable the case study in Chapter 17.
ASP page scripts can be written using VBScript (the default), JavaScript, or other scripting languages. ASP pages are especially useful in creating dynamic interactive Web content that will run on any browser, as all the processing occurs on the server before the resulting Web page is served up to the browser.
Component Object Model (COM)
The Component Object Model (COM) is Microsoft's standard set of specifications that allows components to communicate with each other. It is language independent, so components created using Visual Basic can work with components coded in, say, C++. Of course, here we'll be building our components in VB, and we'll spend a lot of time in Chapters 12 and 13 coding components to act as our Data tier and our Business tier.
Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ)
Message queuing is another feature of the Microsoft Windows Server operating systems. Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ) helps to integrate applications by implementing a business event delivery environment where messages can be sent between applications. It also makes it easier to build reliable applications that will work over networks that may not be as reliable as we would wish.
This simple application, based on the Component Object Model, lets developers focus on business logic, not sophisticated communications programming. MSMQ, while being extremely useful, lies outside the scope of this book.
Universal Data Access (UDA)
Universal Data Access (UDA) provides high-performance access to a variety of information sources, including relational (from sources such as SQL Server, Access or Oracle) and non-relational data (such as data from Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, etc.). UDA also provides an easy-to-use programming interface, ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) that works with all programming tools and languages that support COM.
We're going to be encountering UDA and using ADO in Chapter 11.
SQL Server
SQL Server is a relational database management system for the Microsoft Windows platform. SQL Server delivers a flexible, powerful platform that scales up to terabyte-size (a terabyte is 1,000 GB) databases and down to small business servers and laptop databases. This product is going to provide the data store for our case study, and we'll be working with it extensively in Chapters 9 and 10.
COM+
COM+ is an extension to the Component Object Model (COM), and is shipping as an integrated component in Windows 2000 operating systems. This technology enables us to create distributed components that can interact over any network using the language of our choice.
The COM+ services delivered in Windows 2000 are the next evolutionary step of COM and MTS. The consolidation of these two programming models makes it easier to develop distributed applications by unifying the development, deployment, debugging and maintenance of an application that used to rely on COM for certain services and MTS for others.
COM+ is mentioned in Chapter 4 and covered in more detail in Chapter 5.
Well, we've mentioned it enough times, so let's see what our case study actually consists of.
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