What is AppFabric?
AppFabric is a set of hosted services and acts as middleware between Azure
applications. The definition from the Windows Azure website defines AppFabric as:
"Windows Azure AppFabric provides a comprehensive cloud middleware platform for
developing, deploying and managing applications on the Windows Azure Platform.
It delivers additional developer productivity adding in higher-level
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities on top of the familiar Windows Azure
application model. It also enables bridging your existing applications to the
cloud through secure connectivity across network and geographic boundaries, and
by providing a consistent development model for both Windows Azure and Windows
Server"
The important services of AppFabric are:
- Service Bus
- Access Control
- Caching
- Integration
- Composite Application
Service Bus Service
The Service Bus service provides the functionality for secured connectivity and
messaging between disconnected applications.
Access Control Service
The Access Control service provides identity and access control to web
applications and services. The support included for identity providers like
Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc.
The flexibilities provided by decoupling of authorization rules and the application.
The authorization rules can be deployed in the Access Control. Thus our
application will be clean and focusing on just the business needs.
Caching Service
The Caching service provides a distributed, in-memory, highly available caching
services. The service provides advantages like no installation and instance
management and scalability based on requirement.
Integration Service
The Integration service provides BizTalk Server integration capabilities,
integration patterns to ease development. It also provides Business Activity
Monitoring and Rules as well as trading partner portal and enabling business to
business pipelines.
Composite Application Service
The Composite Application Service eases the deployment of applications that use different Windows Azure services. It contains .NET Framework extensions and
Visual Studio integration components to support the features.
These services will be explored in the upcoming articles.
Software Development Kit (SDK) Download
You need to download the AppFabric SDK to start the learning. The download can
be done using the url.
The first two downloads are source code samples in C# and Visual Basic language.
The last two downloads represent the SDK for 64 bit and 32 bit installations.
Download the SDK based on your processor architecture.
Installation
Now run the downloaded executable and you can see the dialog as below.
Click the Next button to continue.
In the appearing screen above click the Install button to do the installation.
Summary
In this article we have seen about AppFabric, various services inside it and the
installation of AppFabric SDK.