Using Services

An Application Dispatcher service is a collection of one or more Application Servers. The servers might be running on one system or could be distributed across multiple systems. All of the servers in a specified service are assumed to have access to the same applications and data so that a particular client request can be fulfilled by any server within the service. All Application Dispatcher requests include a service name (the _SERVICE parameter) that determines which service performs the request. The Application Broker is responsible for selecting a particular server belonging to that service and forwarding the request to that server.

During the SAS/IntrNet installation process, you created a default service. The default service is a socket service with only one server, the simplest type of service to set up and use. This service is adequate for running the sample programs delivered with Application Dispatcher and beginning to develop your own applications, but there are many reasons that you might want to create additional services. You might want to create separate services for different applications so that you can distribute resources (such as memory, disk space, or priority) among applications. You can create different services with different levels of access as a simple form of security. Often, you need to create separate services for development and production application environments, so that development activities do not affect production applications.

The following pages address some of these issues and describe the process of creating and maintaining services:

• Choosing a Service Type
• Creating and Modifying Services
  • on z/OS
  • on UNIX platforms
  • on Windows platforms
• Enhancing Performance
• Development vs. Production Environments