SAS/CONNECT User's Guide

Direct-Messaging Benefits

Messaging enables application developers to deploy multi-tiered distributed applications. This multi-tiered design allows you to separate and centralize business and data access to the server portion of the application. You can then implement a thin client application that requires little or no maintenance. Not only is it easy to segment your logic into individual programs, but these programs can execute on the host that best meets your data and resource requirements.

To illustrate these benefits consider a three-tiered implementation of a business application. The first tier could be the thin client piece which is a graphical user interface. The middle tier would then contain the business logic that is needed to manipulate data and to produce information. The third tier would perform the data access logic that is necessary to read or to write the data source.

Any piece of this application could be modified without changing the other tiers of the application. For example, the data source could change from a DB2 database to an ORACLE database and only the third tier (the data access logic) would need to be changed.

The SAS System now provides an SCL interface to direct-messaging that allows you to develop integrated SAS/AF and FRAME applications that can communicate through a basic yet flexible interface. In addition, the TCP/IP access method is the only access method that supports direct-messaging.

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