The following diagram illustrates the major components of EPX and the communication pathways and protocols used by the product.
Web browser clients such as TaskManager and Report Tool communicate with an HTTP server using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols, depending on the configuration of the HTTP server. The supported HTTP server is Tomcat 6.1.14 on Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows XP. BEA WebLogic 9.2, which provides its own web-server, is also supported.
The HTTP server forwards all Java servlet requests for TaskManager and Report Tool clients to EPX WebTools Java servlet engine. Tomcat and BEA WebLogic are supported. The TaskManager and Report Tool servlets running within the servlet engine serve as a proxy client to the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) container that runs the EPX EJBs. The supported EJB container is JBoss. For each TaskManager or Report Tool user that logs into the system, the servlet creates a separate user session that is maintained within the servlet engine. These EJBs provide the core application logic of the product. All clients communicate with the EJB container using the RMI/IIOP protocols. The EJBs use JDBC to retrieve and store data contained in the RDBMS used in a given environment. The EJBs also support client authentication against a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory service using JNDI.
EPX provides an EPX RDBMS, but EPX is also supported against the Oracle RDBMS and the Microsoft SQL Server RDBMS. EPX utilizes a collection of over 140 RDBMS tables and views to persist data maintained by the system.
At system startup, the EPX web services container (Tomcat) starts two core application services components, the BIC Manager and the Control Manager. These two components are implemented as a single instance of a Java servlet that is created at the time that the Java servlet engine is started. These two components also communicate directly with the EJB container using the RMI/IIOP protocols. The BIC Manager creates a separate client session for each BIC, while the Control Manager maintains a single client session for its processing (e.g., auditing transactions, controlling interval-based tasks, etc.).
Design Console is the primary data administration tool and is implemented as a Java application that runs as a desktop application. Design Console also communicates directly with the EJB container using the RMI/IIOP protocols.