Jeff Kell wrote:
>Playing devil's advocate (really clueless devil advocate), I can see the
>basic extensions of mod_perl and the like, but how many of these modules
>lend themselves to persistent sessions?  That is what the basis of
>Fast_CGI promised, how do the other modules come into play?

All servlet technologies support persistent sessions.  The included
SessionServlet example shows how this is done with and without using
cookies.  However, I have not tried the example accessing the servlet from
behind a proxy server.  Would it be smart enough to know it is a new
session?  Also, I assume that in a larger environment, load balancers would
be smart enough to route requests back to the server that created the
session.  Servlets also provide session variables.  One can save the result
of one screen right in the servlet itself.  Sessions do expire after some
given time and these variables would disappear.  I heard some real good
examples can be found at
http://www.editcorp.com/personal/lars_appel/index.html ;-)

Lars continued:
>Somehow it seems to me that all this might make nice "interoperability
glue", but
>I would still want the hard work to be done by proven legacy/native
>code (like COBOL or Transact) working on TurboIMAGE data... However,
>this is just a "gut feeling", not a result of scientific research.

I couldn't agree more.  I wouldn't put all of my business logic in servlets
if it already exists in my legacy code.  I like the idea of using the
servlets to provide communication to data servers in their own
account/security space.  This lets me put up several webservers as well as a
pool of data servers giving the solution some scalability.  I can take some
load off of my e3K by putting in a rack of Linux boxes, or other strategic
OS's, to run JSP, ASP, Perl, Python, PHP, Enhydra or whatever.

BTW, another difference between JServ, Tomcat and Enhydra is that JServ is
designed only to work with Apache.  The Apache group developed the Apache
Java Protocol(AJP), which simply passes the request information over a
socket to an out-of-processes server, in this case a Java VM supporting the
servlet 2.0 spec.  While Tomcat uses AJP to communicate with Apache, you can
also drop it into any Java-based Web Server (Sun's former JWS or W3's
Jigsaw).  Tomcat advertises that it will even work with MS IIS.  Enhydra,
and to a lesser extent Tomcat, can be run standalone as they support HTTP.
Tomcat does admit, that they would not recommend using it as an HTTP file
server (a regular web server is faster).

HTH,

Mark Wonsil
4M Enterprises, Inc.