A Closer Look at the Frontend Tier
The frontend of our demonstration multi-tier cluster architecture consists of two managed servers that host the JSPs, servlets, and HTML pages. If your application doesn’t use any EJB or RMI objects, the web/presentation tier cluster should be sufficient for your “pure” web application. To this end, the server instances that live in this frontend cluster host a servlet/JSP container and an HTTP server. Typically, this tier sits in front of a DBMS server — you may need to configure one or more data sources that provide JDBC access to the cluster. In this section, you will learn how to set up this frontend tier, and how to deploy web and presentation tier components to such a cluster.
Our web/presentation tier consists of two servers in a WebLogic cluster. External to this cluster is the Administration Server, which hosts the Administration Console and the domain configuration. So, our application setup requires a WebLogic domain with an Administration Server and two Managed Servers that belong to a cluster. We’ll expand on the load balancer later.
Figure 14-2 depicts the structure of the web/presentation tier within a domain. Here, we have zoomed in on the configuration of the frontend cluster of the multi-tier application setup illustrated earlier in Figure 14-1.
Figure 14-2. A simple web/presentation tier
As the figure shows, each server instance ...
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