SOLUTIONS
Applications
Enterprise Applications
Rails and PHP have transformed the landscape for developing web 2.0 applications. They have
made many tasks easier, but deploying these applications has not been quite so smooth. The
"dirty-little-secret" about using these web frameworks is — deployment is often messy and difficult.
CGI, FastCGI, Mongrel-Clusters ... many solutions have been tried. More recently, the best solution is
emerging — to deploy these applications behind a reverse proxy. This permits the front-end web server
to exclusively serve static content and route the incoming requests. The back-end can then focus on
actually running the application.
The back-end web server is then very different to the front-end (reverse proxy). The front-end must scale and be able to serve static content quickly and securely. The back-end must host the web application and be very efficient with memory and CPU resources.
Appweb is an ideal back-end web server in this scenario for running dynamic web applications. Because Appweb is a fast, multi-threaded, event-driven server, each Appweb instance can host several web application sessions for maximum efficiency and minimal memory footprint. Due to its Apache compatible configuration file, you don't have to learn a whole new configuration setup. Using this configuration, you will lighten the load on your web installation, provide better response to clients and simplify your configuration.
Qualities of an Ideal Back-End HTTP Server
Most existing HTTP servers were designed to be front-end servers before Web 2.0 burst onto the scence. The needs of current dynamic web applications have evolved and so to must the design of back-end web servers. The following lists the ideal qualities of a back-end HTTP server:
- Able to host web applications and frameworks in-memory
- Be very effective with memory. It is inadequate to load the entire web framework for each new application instance.
- Be fast to repond to new client requests
- Be fast to service longer running requests
- Scale
Appweb Specifications
Embedthis Appweb is a 2nd generation design that fulfills today's web 2.0 requirements. It is fast, compact and Apache compatible in configuration and logging. It has an extensive set of features and provides in-memory modules for PHP and Ejscript.
The Appweb embedded HTTP server has the following features:
- Fastest performance in its class
- Extremely efficient with memory allocation
- In-memory PHP and Ejscript modules
- Basic and Digest Authentication
- Dynamically loadable modules
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL/TLS)
- Server-side Embedded JavaScript
- In-process CGI as well as traditional CGI
- Extensive logging
- Full source code and documentation provided