Data Management in Application Servers

This paper surveys data management techniques used in Application Servers. It begins with an overview of Application Server architectures and the way they have evolved from earlier transaction processing systems. It then presents a ta-xonomy of clustered services that differ in the way they manage data in memory and on disk. The treatment of conversational state is discussed in depth. Finally, this paper describes a persistence layer that is designed for and tightly integrated with the Application Server.