Windchill System Administrator's Guide

connect. Thus, new client connections are not refused, and connection timeout is
faster when under a heavy client load. Clients recover from the disconnection
automatically.
System Management
Being the daemon process of the Windchill architecture, the server manager
becomes the key process for performing Windchill system management functions,
such as starting and stopping method servers.
Method Server
The System Configurator provides an interface for these functions, although some
actions (like shutting down the servers) are restricted to authorized user names.
This component is a Java application that executes all methods representing
business object transactions. Architecturally, it starts out simply as a skeleton
process that dynamically loads specific Java classes as they are needed to service
client requests. The following figure shows the anatomy of a method server.
RMI-Based Method Invoking Interface
When a method server process is started, it creates an instance of a method server
object, which is exported as a remote object to the server manager. Clients bind to
a method server by retrieving this object reference from the server manager, and
interacting with the method server directly.
The binding and method-invoking machinery is hidden from application
developers by utility classes and generated helper classes. Its architecturally
significance is that it helps explain how the Windchill runtime operates.
A significant advantage of using Java RMI to invoke server methods is the built-in
support for transferring arbitrarily complex object graphs between client and
server. This allows transactions to use sophisticated arguments and results without
complex programming of the client-to-server interface.
Access to server-side methods is exposed to clients by using helper classes
corresponding to each business class. These classes wrap the externally available
A-14 Windchill System Administrator’s Guide