The OpenEdge Hive

Bruce Gruenbaum:
The Authentication Service is responsible for authenticating a user when the session starts up. All it does is determine that the user is known to the system and that the user's credentials have been authenticated. In most applications, the Authentication Service is a façade that allows implements
its authentication through an LDAP or other authentication service. The Authentication Service also provides the Connection Factory and other services with the credentials they need to authenticate the user of this session against other targets.

Thomas Mercer-Hursh

Bruce Gruenbaum:
The Connection Factory establishes and maintains connections to external targets - databases, AppServers and other TCP/IP targets. It really is responsible for all connectivity to anything that is not in the same process. It handles connection pooling and connection failure. It also abstracts connections into logical connections so that the physical service being requested can be treated separately from the logical connection. This means that a single database connection could be used for multiple logical databases and the same is true for AppServers and any other target.

Bruce Gruenbaum:
The Environment Service determines the context in which the framework is being run. This presupposes that the framework will run in many configurations. Although I am going to talk about it in the context of an OpenEdge application, this is a service that I have written for OpenEdge, Java and C#.

Thomas Mercer-Hursh:

There are a number of questions we want to ask about each candidate service. These include:

1. What kind of service is it? I.e., is it one service for a network? One per application? One for a system? One per session? Can it be replicated without change of function?

2. What inputs does it need?

3. What outputs will it return?

4. Who uses it and how frequently?

5. What does it depend on and how often?

6. How is it managed?

It seems to me that there is an interesting question that runs through several of these threads which has to do with identity. For some things, we often think of the identity of the person as established by a user name and password or some biometric or other means. But, it seems to me that there are other functions which depend on physical identity. E.g., for an AppServer agent starting up, if we are going to have it determine its configuration based on some service, then how do we know which agent it is?

This section will be used to provide general guidelines for the operation and construction of components for this project.