Applications Engineering

The architecture of large-scale enterprise applications has been changing continuously. Instead of self-contained solutions running on their own platforms, perhaps in a client/server setting comprising dedicated hardware, software licenses and local administration, recent years have witnessed the growing popularity of applications servers. These provide multiple components that allow software developers to concentrate on the business logic of each application, enabling the integration of many multi-tier applications that can now be deployed in a shared data center. In addition to the benefits of data and server consolidation, this solution is also amenable to outsourcing because the whole infrastructure can be located at a suitable service provider outside the organization.

The concept of "software as a service" clearly has a very strong impact both on application design and on the structure and business model of service providers and thus expertise in Applications Engineering is increasingly appealing. On the one hand, one must be able to select the relevant components and middleware and to design component-based multi-tiered applications. On the other hand, service-oriented computing demands skills in the areas of design, deployment and operation of the large-scale data centers. As a result, this learning unit is unique in that it provides a global perspective on the technology available at the various tiers and their trade-offs notably with regard to cost, robustness and performance.

Coordination

• Francisco Soares Moura
• António Luís Sousa
• António Nestor Ribeiro
• José Creissac Campos

Learning Outcomes

• To understand and explain the tradeoffs in data center design with respect to cost, performance and robustness.
• To be able to apply redundancy, virtualization and centralized administration techniques to data centers.
• To analise and understand design and behaviour patterns for complex, large-scale, multi-tiered software.
• To be able to develop computational tiers that do not prevent the independent evolution of the data and user interface tiers.
• To identify the main characteristics of application servers and to use service-oriented technology as a means of creating software architectures that are parameterised.
• To understand and explore different techniques for the construction of user interfaces
• To develop presentation tiers that are independent of the data and business tiers

Learning Units

• Data center infrastructure
• Database Administration
• Application Architecture
• Interactive Systems

Partners