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F E A T U R E

IPlanet Goes Where No Server's Gone Before

June 25, 2001
By Lori MacVittie

iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions iPlanet Web Server, Enterprise Edition 6.0

Offering many options for developers and an extremely robust configuration and management scheme, iPlanet's Web Server 6.0 is a scalable and highly manageable enterprise Web server. With advanced cluster support that includes the ability to propagate configurations throughout a Web server farm from a centralized server and an integrated Verity search engine, iPlanet's solution gets a thumbs up from us in all categories. Of the competition, only Zeus provided a better cluster management solution.

IPlanet's magnus.conf editor

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This newest version has a new multiprocess, multithreaded execution model that provides the best possible use of resources. IPlanet has combined this with a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) that runs in-process, increasing the performance of this Web server over previous incarnations. Java servlets are configured via the web.xml file, in compliance with the Servlet 2.2 specification. IPlanet also uses a web-apps.xml for each virtual server to specify the available servlets. Servlets are added to the web-apps.xml file using the standard J2EE deployment descriptor, a well-formed XML file describing the context and physical location of each application. This particular configuration is one of the simplest to perform -- if you are familiar with the deployment descriptor for J2EE. But since iPlanet's Java support is essentially built into the product, we didn't have to spend a lot of time configuring third-party servlet containers as we did for the other products we tested.

Although its product does not yet offer WebDAV support, iPlanet says it is working on supporting WebDAV in future releases. Virtual-server support by host name and IP address is easily configured, and the ability to configure servers as a "class" is a definite boon. This configuration seems a bit awkward at first, but after we played with it awhile we found it extremely intuitive, not to mention handy. You first define a class of server and set its default configuration parameters, then create a Web server instance and assign the instance to a class. This feature may not be widely used by enterprise customers, but service providers will find it makes management of multiple Web servers a breeze.

Providing an integrated certificate server as well as the ability to perform user management via LDAP is a plus. LDAP 3 support is also offered by IBM, Roxen and Zeus. Developers can easily use JSP (JavaServer Page) and Java servlets as well as PERL- and NSAPI (Netscape API)-developed applications out of the box. Third-party plug-ins provide PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor) and, so iPlanet has been told, ASP (Active Server Page) support.

Traffic management is available on a per-instance or per-session basis. For service providers or corporations that want to limit bandwidth usage, this feature, also offered by the products from Roxen and Zeus, is definitely cool.

iPlanet Web Server, Enterprise Edition 6.0, $1,495. Available: Now. iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions (a Sun-Netscape Alliance), (650) 960-1300, (888) 786-8111; fax (650) 528-4124. www.iplanet.com