Michael L Gueterman wrote:

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>  I've *personally* found that CF is the best way to bring up dynamic
>web sites, and works with all of the HP3000 ODBC drivers that I've tried
>(Linkway, ODBC/32, and ODBCLink/SE).  We used it last year for the SigImage
>ballot BTW :)  The one negative about CF is that it doesn't run natively
>on the 3000.  You need to run it on a Windows 95/98/NT, Solaris, or HP-UX
>box :(

I just want to add some additional personal favorites for Java Web Server.  My hope is not to start a "battle of the the best web server" :-)  If it does happen though, hopefully all the positives/negatives of each product discussed will be tastefully exposed.  Hopefully this is not getting to far off topic for the list group.

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A few other reasons that I prefer Java Web Server:  Because a servlet remains resident in memory.  A servlet is one instance of an object.  All http requests to the servlet are threads spun off the same instance.  Therefore, a servlet has a common storage area to all threads/requests.  It is quite simple to maintain a java vector/data structure that contain a session object for each user that is currently in the server.  Also, socket, JDBC, JDBC-ODBC,<plug> ADBC(were expirementing)</plug> connections can be kept active in a connection pool.  Therefore, these types of connections do not need to be recreated for every http request.  Saves a great deal of overhead.  And one more plus.  With a servlet, I can capture a URL before it is passed to the File servlet for processing.  With this ability, I do not have to pass any cgi parameters whatsoever.  If you creating dynamic html, you can hide that fact that you are doing so.  Example:

Say a company has product abc, and wants to generate some dynamic statistics on this product.  The URL for normal cgi processing would look as such "http://www.mycompany.com/product.cfm?product=abc"  or with cookies turned off "http://www.mycompany.com/product.cfm?sessionid=asd432asdf&product=abc".  

With JWS I can have the URL look like "http://www.mycompany.com/product/abc.html" or without cookies(not as elegant) "http://www.mycompany.com/asd432asdf/product/abc.html".  

Your customized servlet can then create dynamic html based on the requested URL/directory/file.

For static html, something in the URL could signify that is is static, "http://www.mycompany.com/staticfile/myfile.html" maybe not quite so obvious.  But your customized servlet would recognize this and instead of processing the http request itself, it would then just forward the http request to the File servlet for normal html file retrieval.

Some developers may not concern themselves with this, but I think is more elegant.
You could also hook up to an application server quite simply, by using raw socket connections, RMI, CORBA from a servlet.  Your application server could then be responsible for database connections, business logic, dynamic html creation, etc...

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Evan Vaala