Working in the Middle-Tier Environment

Understanding the Middle-Tier Environment

The middle tier of the SAS Intelligence Platform enables users to access intelligence data and functionality via a Web browser. This tier provides Web-based interfaces for report creation and information distribution, while passing analysis and processing requests to the SAS servers.

The middle tier of the SAS Intelligence Platform provides an environment in which the business intelligence Web applications, such as SAS Web Report Studio and the SAS Information Delivery Portal, can execute. These products run in a Web application server and communicate with the user by sending data to and receiving data from the user's Web browser. The middle tier applications rely on servers on the SAS server tier to perform SAS processing, including data query and analysis.

The following figure shows how the middle tier interacts with other tiers of the SAS Intelligence Platform. For a description of these components, see SAS Intelligence Platform: Overview.

Architecture of the SAS Intelligence Platform

[Architecture of the SAS Intelligence Platform]

The middle tier includes the following third-party software and SAS software elements:

a Web application server
a Java Development Kit
SAS Web applications, which can include SAS Web Report Studio, the SAS Information Delivery Portal, the SAS BI Dashboard, SAS Help Viewer for the Web, and other SAS products and solutions
the SAS Web Infrastructure Platform, which includes the SAS Content Server and other infrastructure applications and services
SAS Shared Services
a Java remote method invocation (RMI) server, which enables access to SAS Foundation Services and associated extension services

The SAS Intelligence Platform architecture gives you the flexibility to distribute these components according to your organization's requirements. For small implementations, the middle-tier software, SAS Metadata Server, and other SAS servers, such as the SAS Workspace Server and SAS Stored Process Server, can all run on the same machine. In contrast, a large enterprise might have multiple servers and a metadata repository that are distributed across multiple platforms. In addition, the components of the different tiers, such as Web applications that run in a Web application server, might be distributed on separate machines.

SAS software components in the middle-tier include the SAS Foundation Services and the SAS Web Infrastructure Platform.

The following figure illustrates the middle-tier components:

Middle-Tier Components

[Middle-Tier Components]

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