The Sun WebServer 7.0 final release (GA or FCS as often described at Sun) is now available (download is free, support can be purchased). One major emphasis of the release is cluster administration, but it also includes many new features ranging from ECC support to a fully scriptable CLI to support for many Web 2.0 languages and applications. Check out earlier TA entries as well as the blogs accompanying the release including Manish's Top 10 Reasons, and Jyri and Sriram's blogs. Congratulations to the WebServer team on this long-awaited release!

PHP (home page, tutorial, online manual) is very popular language - see this Netcraft survey - for writing Web Applications. A common combination includes Linux, Apache WebServer, MySQL and PHP (thus the term LAMP), but PHP is usable from many other containers. Joe's recent Technical Article explains how to use Sun's WebServer with PHP using different connecting technologies, including as a CGI engine, using FastCGI and as an NSAPI Plugin. Many more PHP-related articles at TheAquarium here.

Rahul has an interesting series of detailed blogs that show how to use different JVM-based scripting languages to write Servlets on Sun's WebServer 7.0 (download) even when using plain J2SE 5 (this is easier in Java SE 6 through JSR 223). The series includes a prologue providing some common code for all the languages and then specific and very detailed entries for jRuby, jScheme, Rhyno and Sleep. And, Now For Something Completely Different... All these use the in-memory JVM from the WebServer, but... Rahul also shows how to use FastCGI to call native Ruby directly.

Did you know that there is a TCL interpreter in Sun's Web Server 7.0? And it is put to good use, as shown by True Blue in this collection of detailed blog entries on WADM, starting with why TCL was chosen (this was way before jRuby came into focus at Sun), going through parts II (global variables), III (ACL), IV (log analyzer), V (access to Java objects), VI (parsing httpd.config), VII (faking a file system), and the last - so far - VIII (extensions).

I could not find a concise quote for the Monty Python eurojoke, but here is one set of fly-in-the-soup jokes.

ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) is a new, cryptographic protocol that is very appealing when security needs are high or computational power is limited (like mobile devices) and is gaining backing in the industry. The latest Sun WebServer (7.0 Technology Preview) has Support for ECC, and so do GlassFish - experimental so far -, and Java. In his latest blog, Jyri reports on actual measurements of the connection cost for different security protocols on Sun's WebServer and shows Big Improvements for ECC. Check it out!

The team of Sun's WebServer is a close relative of Project GlassFish and I feel a bit guilty I've not been able to keep up with all their interesting blogs in the last couple of months - maybe I'll be able to do some about it next week during Sun's USA shutdown...