A new tool to support the Application Server has been added: Visual Application Server Administrator. This is a graphical user interface tool that allows administrators to manage and monitor systems running under the OpenROAD Application Server. It works in conjunction with ASOLib (see below).

There are three distinct functions provided by Visual ASA:

Visual ASA provides an intuitive Explorer style interface for Name Server management. There is one Name Server per AppServer installation. Multiple applications can be registered with one or more Name Servers to provide connection load balancing across processes within a given machine, and across processes on different installations.

Each installation's Server Pooler (SPO) and Application Object (ASO) configuration parameters are maintained using Visual ASA. Details of each application registered with a Name Server can also be maintained and interrogated, and each running application can be monitored.

Application monitoring uses the same interface to drill down into a particular application instance. The application instance can be started and stopped, and individual user sessions can be monitored and traced. Each application's callable interface can also be explored dynamically using the Visual ASA MetaData interface.

Visual ASA also acts as a production system Housekeeping Console, invoking garbage collection and expired session timeout within each application, freeing up memory used by stale objects where appropriate.

A limited functionality browser-based version of Visual ASA is also provided.