Program guide > (deprecated) Partitioning facility > The partitioning facility > J2EE partitioning capabilities


Deprecated feature: The partitioning facility (WPF) feature is deprecated. You can configure partitioning with WebSphere eXtreme Scale.


HTTP partitioning

The partitioning facility (WPF) provides the capability to partition HTTP requests across back end WAS instances. Known as HTTP partitioning, this capability works with the on demand Router (ODR), which uses an awareness of partition location to forward HTTP requests to the appropriate target application server. This section provides an overview of the HTTP partitioning function, the architecture of the solution, and defines key concepts that are required to implement HTTP WPF applications.

The HTTP WPF partitions are no different than Enterprise JavaBeans™ (EJB) workload Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP) based partitions: they correspond to a related collection of data elements that are commonly accessed together. They have the distinct feature that no data element belongs to more than one partition. This property enables Web applications to make inferences in how these data elements can be treated. That is, no data element belongs to two partitions and a single partition is only active on one application instance at most.

When an application receives a request for a particular partition, it can be certain that no other application instance is accessing this partition and the associated data elements. As such, the application can leverage this certainty by being more aggressive in treating the partitioned data. When combined with techniques such as caching and batching, this application performance is improved by increasing the efficacy of size-limited caches and reducing the overhead in ensuring data consistency.

HTTP partitioning operates on the premise that incoming HTTP requests contain sufficient information to identify the partition that is associated with the request. This premise places two key restrictions on application architecture:

  1. The access data for Each HTTP request is associated with exactly one partition.

  2. The HTTP URL must contain the partition name.
Restriction 1 can be typically resolved by merging overlapping partitions into a single partition. Design the application URL with care to ensure that restriction 2 is satisfied.


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J2EE partitioning capabilities


Related concepts

J2EE partitioning capabilities

The role of the ODR


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