Open Market WebServer
The Open Market WebServer is an easy-to-install advanced software product that forms the foundation for business solutions in the enterprise and for electronic commerce. Ideally suited for use in mission-critical environments, it meets the needs of developers who require high-performance integration with external systems, as well as the challenges of companies demanding World Wide Web servers capable of thousands of simultaneous connections. It is designed to meet the challenges of companies demanding World Wide Web servers capable of thousands of simultaneous connections, and it is earmarked for use in mission-critical production environments. The Open Market WebServer sets the standard for performance and functionality while providing unrivaled interoperability with every WWW browser.
The Open Market WebServers offer the following features:
- High performance
- FastCGI--fast and easy-to-use WebServer extensibility
- Standards
- Flexible access control
- Enhanced logging features
- Support for "Virtual Hosts"
- Session Tracking and Authentication
- Server-Side Includes
- Byte Range Extension to HTTP Support
High Performance
The Open Market WebServer has been designed from the ground up to offer the highest levels of performance. The WebServer's multi-threaded architecture recently ran PC Week's independent benchmark tests significantly faster than other Web servers, and supports over 1,000 concurrent client connections--several times the capacity of any other existing server. In contrast, the single-threaded "dynamic process" architecture of competing servers is much less efficient in handling requests, thus limiting the capacity of the server.
As compared to other commercial and freeware Web servers which claim "high performance", Open Market's Secure WebServer surpassed all others - by factors of as high as 40% faster - in the following tests:
- Server capacity: Open Market's WebServer handled more connections/second than the leading competitive product.
- Server latency: Open Market benchmarked as having the fastest average time for the Web server to respond to a request from a client.
- Average server throughput: Open Market benchmarked at faster server throughput rates than the leading competitive server products.
FastCGI
WebServer and Secure WebServer offer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow a programmer to extend the functionality of the server. Open Market offers two API levels to match differing application needs.
The high-level API (FastCGI) offers fast and easy-to-use extensibility for most applications. Performance is much higher than CGI for several reasons:
- The start-up overhead of CGI is avoided
- Server-to-application communication is optimized
- Because applications can cache information in memory between requests
Yet the programming model is similar to CGI, so the learning process for new programmers is very easy compared to the low level proprietory API's available on other servers. If a developer is familiar with CGI, then the migration to this new high-level API is very simple and straightforward. The high-level API is well suited to most demanding applications, including user-profile and database driven dynamic content, groupware applications, and other enterprise applications which may require a persistent connection between clients and the database..
The low-level API offers more complete access to the server internals. Such access allows an extension to implement basic new server features, such as new security protocols, that cannot be implemented using the high-level API. The low-level API has ease-of-use similar to Web server APIs from other vendors and as such is much more difficult to learn and use effectively than the high-level API. Open Market encourages use of the high-level API but makes the low-level API available for the rare application that requires it.
Standards
All Open Market WebServer products are based on Web standards:
- Common Gateway Interface (CGI/1.1), the standard interface for server scripts
- HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP/1.0), for interoperability with all existing Web clients
- Support for a variety of file types including: Java, GIF, JPEG, MPEG, VRML, and of course HTML V3
Flexible Access Control
The Open Market WebServer incorporates a powerful access control scripting language for implementing complex access policies. WebServer administrators can control access based on host, time of day, username, browser software type, authentication method, and other parameters.
Enhanced Logging
The additional information captured by Open Market's built-in extended log format greatly simplifies business analysis of all website activity--a capability which is difficult and time-consuming with other servers that do not log these vital pieces of usage data. All WebServer products support Open Market's extended logging facility, which offers several additional advantages:
- Integrated format: all access, error, and security information recorded in a single record.
- Additional information fields, such as browser software type, referring URL, security information, and request begin/end times.
- Named field format designed for easy parsing and future expansion.
Open Market's WebReporter software analyzes extended format logs to generate customized reports of server activity. The WebServer also supports the "common" log format, for compatibility with existing log analysis and reporting tools.
Support for "Virtual Hosts"
The virtual hosting capability enables a single instance of WebServer or Secure WebServer to serve custom content based on the destination IP address in the client request. For example, a WebServer processing connections for two domains, 'www.abc.com' and 'www.xyz.com', is able to serve ABC's home page for requests to 'www.abc.com', and XYZ's home page for requests to 'www.xyz.com'. Many of the Web servers on the market today do not support this level of granularity, resulting in added complexity for the Webmaster, who must run multiple instances of the Web server to support multiple domains, or, added complexity for the end user, who must keep track of additional pathname components in URLs.
Session Tracking and Authentication
Session Tracking and Authentication enables the server to track anonymous tickets. This capability allows applications to track users, not just server hits. For example, a reporting application can generate a report of the content that a particular client accessed during a particular session.
Anonymous ticketing is the ability to assign a ticket (Session Identifier) anonymously to users traveling through some ticket enabled content. The Session Identifier uniquely identifies one individual from another, but there is no way to determine an individual's personal identity.
Server-Side Includes
WebServer and Secure WebServer 2.0 support the NCSA server-side includes specification.
Server-side includes enable a user to dynamically insert content into a document. For example, header, footer and signature files can be shared by multiple documents, leading to simplified management for consistent presentation.
Byte Range Extension to HTTP Support
Byte Range Extension to HTTP Support gives web applications the ability to request the server to give a byte range of a document. For example, an Adobe PDF viewer can access individual pages by byte range. Support for this standard promotes interoperability between clients and servers, making partial caching effective and saving bandwidth.
Operating systems currently supported:
- SunOS 4.1.4
- Sun Solaris 2.4 (SPARC)
- Digital UNIX 3.0
- BSD/386 1.1 and 2.0
- HP-UX 9.04 and 9.05
- IBM AIX 4.1.2
- SGI IRIX 5.3
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