Tips and Snippets

Application Engine is two things:

• Development environment
  
• Runtime environment
  

It's a development tool integrated with Application Designer. It's a runtime environment driven from structured programs.

It was introduced as an alternative to Cobol in Release 5.  It moved from a separate application to part of Application Designer in version 8. In version 8, it supported restart, parallel processing and PeopleCode integration. Also included were full internet integration and improved MetaSQL.

Application Engine can be fairly handy in a PeopleSoft developer's tool chest.

Aside from all of the useful batch processing things that it can do, it can also be useful for providing ways of running PeopleCode against a system directly from within Application Designer.

This can be used for things like testing some PeopleCode or providing some developer productivity utilities.

Application Server

The application server is the core of PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture; it executes business logic and issues SQL to the database server. The application processing logic that ran on the client in previous releases now runs on the application server. The application server consists of numerous PeopleSoft services and server processes that handle transaction requests. These include requests to:

*Authenticate users.
*Build application pages.
*Save application pages.
*Run some PeopleCode.
*Execute SQL (prompts, page-specific SQL, validations, and so forth).

The application server is responsible for maintaining the SQL connection to the database for the browser requests and the Windows development environment. PeopleSoft uses Tuxedo to manage database transactions and Jolt, Tuxedo's counterpart, to facilitate transaction requests issued from the internet. Both Tuxedo and Jolt are products of BEA Systems.

The Portal Processor executes as an application service of the PeopleSoft application server. It executes with the other application services, like the Component Processor, Security Manager, and SQL Access Manager. Portal Processor tasks include:

*Fetching content templates from the database.
*Fetching content references from the database portal registry and caching them in the application server portal registry.
*Processing personalizations.
*Interacting with other application services (lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), role-based security, and so forth).

For PeopleTools 8.4x, PeopleSoft supports application servers on Windows NT/2000 and UNIX operating systems from Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems.