Reason #17: Magic xpa has a Built-In Licensing Mechanism

20 Reasons to Migrate Magic eDeveloper, uniPaaS and Magic xpa to .NET by Upgrading Rather than Converting

One of the deficiencies of C# as it compares to Magic xpa is that it lacks any sort of licensing mechanism. Licensing is important for software publishers who want to use Magic xpa to create and protect commercial software. It also provides an added measure of security and risk prevention to corporate software users. Licensing mechanisms help to prevent unlicensed software usage and therefore reduce the risk that a company can be sued for copyright and other violations. When considering migration of Magic eDeveloper to C#.NET or ASP.NET or Java (or uniPaaS or Magic xpa), it is important to consider your need for licensing mechanisms.

 Magic xpa’s built-in license-metering mechanism uses your local area network (LAN) to communicate between Magic xpa instances running on different machines on the network. As part of our ongoing commitment to comply with the latest and highest industry standards, Magic introduced a new policy for the activation of our software licenses in 2012. The improved process, implements a highly secure, automated method of license protection, enabling you to better monitor the use of your licensed software.

You activate and receive your licenses after validating your Product Key on Magic’s License Activation Portal. The metering mechanism helps organizations avoid any unintentional violation of the license. The license-metering module ensures that no more than the allowed number of connections uses Magic xpa concurrently.

Magic xpa includes a license management scheme. The license management system comprises three main components: a License File, which stores all the license information for a specific site; the Magic xpa Engine, which uses data from the License File to allow or prevent user access to an installed Magic xpa product; a License Server, which provides license information to the Magic xpa engine, and also counts the active users of the installed product.

Magic xpa offers three license modes: no license, demo license and permanent license. The Magic xpa License File, when initially created, contains a default demo license. This demo license has no time limit but is limited in its functionality and cannot be used for the development and deployment of mission-critical applications. Permanent licenses have no time limit. When you load Magic xpa with no license, essentially without specifying a license name, the Single User Edition will run.

The single-user limitation is relevant for both the development of the application, as well as its deployment. Magic xpa Single User Edition provides almost the complete range of features found in the commercial edition of Magic xpa, excluding multi-user related features and capabilities.

Magic xpa also includes convenient mechanisms for counting licenses and running floating licenses. To count licenses, you can run MGSTATIONS.exe from the Magic xpa directory to verify the license count of a specified license on a network.

Magic xpa's default behavior is that you have to define the number of licenses that each server uses during the execution of a project. This number is checked across all the servers in a multi-project environment to ensure that it is within the license limitation. For example, if you have a license with 20 threads, and you have two projects running in a multi-project environment, you have to distribute the threads in advance. Project A might receive 15 threads, while Project B receives 5.

In a multi-project environment, each server runs a different project. This means that the capacity of each server (project) is a key issue, and the ability to share licenses (threads/users) is very important.

Magic xpa's floating license mechanism lets you make optimum use of these licenses in a multi-project environment, by sharing licenses between servers. Therefore, when a particular project is idle, other projects can utilize its licenses.

Because the Magic xpa broker controls the servers and their capacity, it needs to know the total number of licenses that are available for its servers. The broker adds up the total maximum threads and users belonging to each server. The broker uses this figure as the total number of available threads/users. If the broker sees that a particular server is not using its allocated number of threads/users, the floating license mechanism means that they can be used by other servers.

Using C# to manually license software is a fool’s errand. Using C# to bind in a third-party licensing scheme is also very expensive and time consuming. The advantage of the Magic xpa Application Platform is that licensing is built-in to the platform as a protection to both corporate end users and software developers.

For additional information on how an upgrade to Magic xpa is superior to Magic to .NET conversion please convert here.