Ali-Tomcat is the runtime container that Enterprise Distributed Application Service (EDAS) uses to run High-speed Service Framework (HSF) applications. To develop and deploy HSF applications, you need both Ali-Tomcat and Pandora.
Ali-Tomcat supports only HSF applications packaged as WAR files.
Integrated features
Ali-Tomcat integrates the following features for HSF application development:
Service publishing -- Register HSF services so that other applications can discover and call them.
Service subscription -- Subscribe to published HSF services and consume them from your application.
Tracing -- Track requests across distributed services to diagnose latency and errors.
You can publish applications in Ali-Tomcat in both development and runtime environments.
Pandora: dependency isolation
Pandora (taobao-hsf.sar) is a lightweight isolation container that prevents dependency conflicts in middleware-heavy environments. Without isolation, upgrading one middleware library can break another or conflict with your application dependencies.
Pandora isolates dependencies at two levels:
Application vs. middleware -- Your application dependencies stay separate from middleware libraries, so version conflicts do not affect your code.
Middleware vs. middleware -- Each middleware service runs in its own classpath. You can upgrade one plug-in without breaking another.
Built-in plug-ins
Pandora in EDAS ships with plug-ins that provide the following middleware features:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Service discovery | Locate and connect to services across your EDAS deployment |
| Configuration push | Push configuration updates to applications at runtime |
| Tracing | Collect distributed traces for request tracking and diagnostics |
These plug-ins enable service monitoring, service governance, tracing, and analytics for EDAS applications.