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A discussion of application servers and Web servers would not be complete without a brief introduction to some of the technologies used to allow a Web server to serve dynamic data. In a way, these technologies are what led people to realize that Web servers can also serve application data such as XML instead of merely serving up HTML documents.
When discussing how a Web server works, it is not enough to simply outline a diagram of how low-level network packets go in and out of a Web server.
Although these technologies may appear to be close in definition to an application server, they are different. Web application technologies are primarily focused on delivering dynamically generated HTML documents to a user’s Web browser while they interact with a Web site. The pure application servers do not format data for humans to read. Rather they act as an engine that processes data for another program to read and interpret on behalf of the user.
In this section we will provide a description of the following technologies:
- CGI
- Microsoft ASP
- Java Servlets
- PHP
- Mod_perl
The first such technology is Common Gateway Interface, commonly referred to as CGI. As previously discussed in the section that focused on what a Web server does, CGI programs serve HTML data dynamically based on input passed to them. Many people associate CGI with a language called Perlbecause Perl has been used to create a majority of the CGI scripts that currently in use.
However, CGI is not language specific — it is merely a protocol for allowing the Web server to communicate with a program. CGI can be written in any language, and common choices, in addition to Perl, include C, Python, and TCL.
The disadvantage of CGI is that it tends to be slow because each request for a dynamic document relies on a new program being launched. Starting new processes on a Web server adds extra overhead. Soon after CGI came into being, other technologies quickly followed to solve this performance issue.
Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) technology consists of embedding a VBScript interpreter into the Microsoft Internet Information Server. On the Java front, Servlets and Java Server Pages connects a perpetually running Java Virtual Machine to a Web Server. Servlets have an additional advantage over ASPs in that they become cached in the Java Virtual Machine after their first execution. VBScript pages are reinterpreted each time they are hit.
In the Open Source community, PHP (http://www.php.net/). It is similar to JSP and ASP technology in that PHP consists of a set of additional code tags placed inside of existing HTML documents. The interesting part about PHP is that it is a language developed purely to serve Web pages rather than being based off of an existing language such as Perl, Python, Visual Basic, or Java. This makes PHP-written applications very succinct compared to equivalent VBScript or JSP applications.
While all of this was going on, the Perl community did not rest on its laurels. All of today’s major Web servers have Perl acceleration solutions available to it. Apache has a free solution called mod_perl, which embeds the Perl interpreter inside of Apache. Not only does this speed up Perl scripts, but the scripts themselves are also cached by mod_perl, providing further performance boosts.
Mod_perl also hooks tightly into Apache so a Perl developer can literally change the behavior of how the Apache Web Server works. Previous to mod_perl, this type of control over a Web server belonged solely to the realm of C programmers coding to the low-level Apache API.
Commercial solutions from ActiveState and Binary Evolutionalso exist to accelerate Perl in a similar way to mod_perl. ActiveState’s product, PerlEx, accelerates CGI/Perl scripts for Internet Information Server while Binary Evolution’s product exists for Netscape, Apache, and Internet Information Server on both Unix and NT platforms.
Phew! With all these fast solutions around, it may seem like it’s a bit hard to choose a language to in which to develop when making Web servers serve up dynamic pages. Actually, it’s quite easy. Unless you have a really large hit rate where squeezing every performance bit out helps, you should go with whatever language is comfortable for you or your organization to do its job effectively.
