I know that the deployment view (i.e. decisions like physical nodes, network, DMZ, location of the Web &
EJB containers on which host) is not part of the delivery for certification part 2, but I think this aspect is very important (fundamental) for non-functional requirements like availability, performance, scalabity, security so I would like to discuss about the deployement of a typical J2EE application with a Web access.
In the component diagram, I can specify the "Tier" but the term Tier is confusing: sometimes like an application layer, sometimes like a machine ...
My fundamental question is:
Do we have to locate the Web-Container and EJB-Container on separate machine? Pros and Cons
I will try to give an answers, perhaps bad answers :-)
About
performance, it is better (10x, 100x ...) to put the two containers on the same machine (local interface or application server optimization) (in spite of all EJB-Patterns to avoid netword traffic)
About
security, it is better to minimize the application on DMZ, so a simple Web server for static content of the site and forwarding the dynamic request to the machine (outside the DMZ) hosting the web-container is a good approach. In this case, we split the Web server and the machine running the Web-container.
I don't know the impacts in case of Web services (?)
About
scalability and
availability, I don't see any difference -> we can add instance of Application server (Web-Container+EJB-Container put together) or instance of Web-tier host and EJB-tier host
Last remark (I hope I will not violate the rules of this newgroup)
I think it is harm to not require the deployement view in the project submission. It should be: 'you have a budget of xxxx $US or Euro for the hardware infrastructure, the material must come from Sun, it's a Sun certification :-), specify the deployement view (machine, network topology, ...)'
Instead of that the project statement imposes the machines: "we have chosen one ..." for Application server, Web servers and DB and there are two single points of failure in the descibed system (DB and Application server); difficult in this case to achieve the required four'9 level of availability in this situation.
Renaud