As a test bed for features, the Einet web site demonstrates the flexibility which can be achieved from a Colony enabled system. Colony has allowed us to build a true N-tier system that is manageable, flexible and fast.
The Einet web site is built on a custom built knowledge base. The knowledge base is simply a tree of information that we can extend and change as needed. To make it easier to manage (and demonstrate the Colony product) we also built an editor to update the pages.
Browser --> Apache --> Tomcat --> Knowledge Base --> Database
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Editor ----------------------------------
The windows based editor provides a better method of editing information on the site. This is apposed to the classical method of doing everything through web based forms.
Keeping the knowledge base as a seperate service also ensures the web developer is not able to mix business logic with the application. This forces the web tier to be simple and forces the model/view/controller paradigm.
The Editor is implemented in C++ while the knowledge base and Tomcat Application server are in Java. This provides us with the a good testing environment for the heterogeneous capabilities of Argot and Colony.
A major point of many distributed systems is their speed across a wide network. Using Colony we are able to retrieve a whole tree of information using a single request/response pair. This is a big change from distributed systems like CORBA where each child node is created and interacted individually. A similar tree population could take hundreds of interactions which would be unusable over the internet.
Using a HTTP transport layer for Colony allows us to use an editor via the internet without openning additional ports on our firewall.
In the future we will be providing the editor so that anyone can view our web site using a rich client environment.