It's a portal. It's a VPN. No, it's webNetwork 4.0 from Stoneware. It can't leap tall buildings in a single bound, but it can give local and remote users a single, secure point of access for all Web content and applications. It can even bring third-party portals together. And by leveraging directory services, webNetwork can give customers, partners and employees personalized desktop views of your Web resources.
I tested webNetwork in our Real-World Labs at Syracuse University. A Java application, webNetwork can run on any platform that supports Sun Microsystems' JVM (Java Virtual Machine) 1.3 or higher. I loaded it on a Windows Server 2000 machine with a 1,400-MHz dual Intel processor, 1 GB of RAM and a Gigabit Ethernet connection. ZeroG's InstallAnywhere set up webNetwork along with a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) 1.4.2-b28 without incident using approximately 100 MB of disk space. Once installed, webNetwork executes a loader (server) as a program or service under Windows.
Before you apply console security, you must step through the two wizards that create and configure your webNetwork server and services and then implement directory services as a local XML document database (LocalTree.XML). If you have many users and demand high performance, you should leverage a supported directory service like Active Directory, OpenLDAP (2.1.x) or Novell's eDirectory. The wizards also populate webNetwork objects into a public context in the selected directory and create a relay service, the default entry point into webNetwork.
The relay acts as a proxy on behalf of users and passes requests to other Web services, which means you can run the relay services on a separate server in a DMZ outside your firewall. It will communicate with the webNetwork server and Web resources inside the firewall using the Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) protocol.
Test Setup
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