Need for AppFabric
As a trend Microsoft has always tried to come up with kind of programming models that are focused on faster business logic development thereby moving away the developers from intrinsic implementation details. Ideally developers shouldn’t spend their time creating infrastructure. The people who write business applications should focus primarily on creating business functions for their users and not infrastructure. Whatever infrastructure is required should be provided by the platform they’re building on.
With .Net 3.0 Microsoft came out with two new programming paradigms that are modeled to assist the developers to implement business logic more easily than ever with Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. WCF took SOA and interoperability to next level and WF provided platform for authoring and execution of long-running workflows. Till .Net 3.5 developers needed to write their own infrastructure stuffs.
Microsoft in its attempt to provide a platform for better application infrastructure rolled out Windows AppFabric. By providing a set of extensions to Windows Server, Microsoft aims at making it easier for Windows developers to create faster, more scalable, and more manageable applications. To come up with terms of the requirements of a complete ecosystem MS released two application development platforms: -
- Windows Server AppFabric: This provides comprehensive infrastructure based on IIS 7.0 & WAS based platform to provide caching and WCF/WF services. AppFabric comes with limitation of targeting only IIS 7.0 and above. WAS provided several features that were always present on the wish list of the developers who work around the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Features like Message-based Activation, capability to recycle worker process, application management and easy configuration.
- Windows Azure AppFabric: This provides a comprehensive cloud middleware platform for developing, deploying and managing applications on the Windows Azure Platform. It delivers additional developer productivity adding in higher-level Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities on top of the familiar Windows Azure application model.
AppFabric is not the same “app server” both for Windows and the Cloud as there is absolutely no feature parity between the two. Windows Server AppFabric provides service hosting and caching, while Azure AppFabric provides Service Bus and Access Control. The two are "AppFabric" in name only. In this article we shall only cover Windows Server AppFabric. The idea of this article is to get started on configuring & understanding Windows Server AppFabric.
