Adventures in Web Serving

We've been working diligently on Update 2 for nearly six months. There's some really substantial behind-the-scenes performance improvements (the most significant of which are applicable to all platforms, not only Solaris) that allowed the T5220 launch to set a new world record SPECweb2005 benchmark:

http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5220/benchmarks.jsp#4

Web Server 7.0 Update 2 also introduces a PKCS#11 bypass feature to achieve better SSL performance out-of-the-box, more administration options, Solaris Monitoring Framework (SMF) integration, certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and the introduction of 64-bit binary support for Linux, NetBeans 6 support, bug and stability fixes, an integrated news feed to keep users up-to-date, and much more!

Be the first on your block to install Web Server 7.0 Update 2! Burn it on a CD/DVD and hand it out at holiday parties. Makes for a great Secret Santa gift.

Download:
https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=SJWS-7.0U2-OTH-G-F@CDS-CDS_SMI

The new Niagara 2 systems have been announced. They're sweet boxes. The T5220 is an incredible workhorse, and has just posted world record SPECweb2005 benchmarks.

Read more on the Web Tier blog.

Great job guys! Fricken awesome!

MSIE 6 handles PNG Alpha Channels really badly. For years now I've not used them because of MSIE 6's poor implementation, and this means modern browsers that can handle them have not been working at their best while I designed with badness in mind.

"Stupid MSIE 6," I'd grumble as I made yet another low bit-depth image, edges aliased to an "average" background color, a single background color. "I was making GIF images like this in 1996. When does The Future start?"

So now I've decided to just present craptacular images to MSIE 6 and let all the rest of the browsers in the world (including MSIE 7) get that Alpha Channel Loving they crave. Here's how I did it without have to modify a single HTML file or PHP application.

Forrester has published a review of Sun's offerings in the App Server market. Generally a positive review I think:

What a difference 18 months makes. Sun Microsystems trailed the field in our 2004 evaluation of application server platforms and is a solid Strong Performer in this year's evaluation. Sun's platform grew substantially with its acquisition of SeeBeyond, and the company has spent about a year integrating those products with its Java Enterprise System (ES) modules. The SeeBeyond products, now called the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS), provide very strong SOA, integration, and business process management (BPM) features relative to the competition. Sun's platform products don't yet have the "extreme battle testing" of IBM and BEA Systems, with the exception of its Web and Directory Servers.

Several months ago I wrote about an NSAPI Output filter that could be used to strip extra white space from HTML. At the time I also commented that with the release of Web Server 7.0 there would surely be a better (or at least easier) way to do the same task.[Read More]

A long while ago I wrote about blocking external linking to images on Web Server 6.1. That solution has been working really well for me for a long while, but I've found it to be lacking for my Gallery2 install, and I've been wanting to improve on it for Web Server 7.0.[Read More]

I've stumbled across two external blogs (well ... one blog and one content aggregation point) with interesting information about Sun Java System Web Server:

Derek Crudgington blogging about his Web Server experiences

Learning Solaris aggregation of Web Server articles

This just makes me smile: