At application runtime, your WebClient application operates under the control of the WebClient i+ Server, also known as the WebClient i+ Runtime Framework. The WebClient i+ Runtime Framework is implemented as an extension of a standard J2EE Servlet, and provides all the services necessary to deploy your WebClient application as secure, high performance web applications. The servlet model is powerful – fast performance and ease of use make it the architecture of choice over older mechnisms like CGI. For example, servlets can be utilized in high performance, load balanced configurations utlizing multiple web server instances
The WebClient Runtime Framework comes in two editions – the ADC Server edition and the Websydian Server+ edition. There is no difference between the editions, except that the Websydian edition is compatible with WSE applications and can run classic Websydian applications.
The WebClient i+ Runtime Framework consists of the following services:
CA Plex Application Connection
The WCi+ server connects the browser Ajax presentation layer to the business logic generated from your CA Plex action diagrams. For example, user interactions like right-clicking on a grid or selecting a value from a combo box are communicated as events to the CA Plex applications. And corresponding, action diagram statements that affect the presentation layer like updating values or refreshing the grid are communicated to the browser.
Session Management
As is standard for web applications, the WCi+ server creates and manages sessions for each web site user. Session tracking is a mechanism that is used to maintain state about a series of requests from the same user (that is, requests originating from the same browser) across some period of time. Typical session data that can be of interest is the authenticated user (if any), the URL used to start the web application, the session id, method (GET or POST), query parameters, etc. For more information on tracking sessions in WebClient, please visit this blog post: http://www.adcaustintech.com/webclient/blog/?p=198.
The WCi+ server also manages session timeouts. For more information on setting inactivity timeouts, please visit this wiki page: http://adcaustintech.com/webclient/wiki/index.php?title=Configuring_Session_Timeout_in_Apache_Tomcat
Logging and Tracing
The WCi+ Server logs application events of interest, including errors. See the log4j.logger.com.adcaustin.webclient setting for details. The log can be configured to output performance metrics, which is useful when optimizing response time of your web applications. See servlet.statistics.level in the documentation for more details on this.
WCi+ can also display specific error pages when an error occurs, via the servlet.errorpage.url setting.
Calling WebClient Applications from an External Application
The WCi+ server can respond to requests to show web pages from external applications or packages, also called deep linking. With deep linking, parameters can also be passed into the web request. See the user manual for more information.
Licensing
The WCi+ Server manages the licensing process, tracking how many concurrent users are logged in against the tier of server you have purchased. If you exceed the number of users you have licensed, error messages will be generated in the log.
