* What to expect with application services in Windows Server 2003
Last week, we began to look at the new features due with Windows Server 2003, looking specifically at the very desirable changes coming in Active Directory. But there are nine other areas that also include new or improved functionality:
* Application Services.
* Clustering Services.
* File and Print Services.
* Internet Information Services.
* Networking and Communications.
* Security Services.
* The Microsoft .Net Framework.
* Terminal Services.
* Windows Media Services.
So we best get on to the next one, application services.
Application services sounds innocuous, but included is the one area that has gotten most attention in the press over the past couple of years: Web services as provided by the .Net initiative.
At a very basic level, application services provides the mundane necessities for the applications – TCP/IP for networking, as well as port services to communicate over IP, transaction services for a database, display services for showing output and print services to maintain more permit copies of the output. Less apparent services include security systems, middleware for component management, and queuing services for asynchronous communications between applications.
One of the major benefits of the Windows family of operating systems is that the programming interface to these services is available across the entire range, from desktop operating systems like XP, all the way to Datacenter Server, used for the most robust applications.
Scaling an application then, is relatively easy to accomplish. Old timers may remember the situation from 20 years ago when every time you wanted to scale up (for faster processing or to handle more users or data) you needed to replace the hardware and the operating system, learn a completely new set of APIs and rewrite the software. Times have changed, and times have changed for the better.
The key new feature – new, at least, since Windows 2000 – is the .Net framework. While this was present in rudimentary form in Windows XP, it reaches a new plateau with Windows Server 2003. In essence, the .Net framework does for Web services and applications what the DLL file does for PC services and applications. It provides common services and functions available to all of the applications running in its environment.
Again looking back 20 years, a programmer could not rely on anything outside of his code to be present on the machine on which it was executing. The programming magazines of the day were always filled with new sorting and randomizing routines that you could incorporate into your applications. Microsoft changed all that with the advent of the Windows operating system. Common utility routines, the plumbing on which computing is based, were present and open for anyone to use. If you needed to sort something, you called on one of the sort routines in the Windows API. Software became richer and more productive because software engineers no longer had to reinvent common routines every time they wrote a program. The .Net framework hopes to provide that same service layer to Web services and applications.
If you aren’t familiar with the benefits of .Net, find out more on the Microsoft Developer Network (https://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/), it could be the major reason why you’ll want to upgrade to Windows Server 2003 as soon as possible.
