[Xitami] Advantages Disadvantages

[Trent Reimer]

----- Original Message -----
From: DocTrane@aol.com
To: xitami@lists.xitami.org
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 2:11 PM
Subject: [Xitami] Advantages Disadvantages

>Would like some advice on the advantages vs disadvantages of the various
open source servers around.
>xitami / apache / python(zope) / ++ <=........ how about the top 10
ANYONE



Hi Dave,

I'm replying not as an expert but as a user which is a useful perspective
too. I have been experimenting with different servers and have certainly
found them to have some obvious strengths and weaknesses from the end user's
perspective.

I like Xitami in that it runs efficiently and is very easy to configure. You
can also come here for support issues. In all my wanderings I have yet to
find a server with as straightforward a configuration as this one. It will
get the most out of your hardware which is a bonus too.

Apache is an industry standard and has a huge number of contributers. You
can download prebuilt modules which extend the basic functionality of the
server as well. You have to do your research to configure this one but there
is a lot of info and examples out there. Functionality is excellent.

Pi3web is a newer server which is gaining in popularity and supports all
kinds of popular technologies, but again, configuration is not so
straightforward as Xitami and there is much less documentation than Apache.

Java based web servers are gaining in both popularity and usefulness. That
has been surprising to me as java is not the most hardware-efficient
language, but benchmarks and personal experience have attested that there
are useful products out there. Generally the java based servers are set up
to use servlets or java server pages or else serve static content but there
is now work underway to support other scripting languages like PHP and Perl.

Jigsaw server is a case study for the World Wide Web Consortium
(http://www.w3.org/Jigsaw) and has support for servlets and also for filters
like PHP (although I've had trouble connecting to a database through PHP
with this server). You can also set it up to work with a Java Server Pages
engine. The standard in java based servers right now though is Tomcat
(http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat) which was originally largely just a
servlet engine for apache but has become a stronger stand-alone server in
version 4 and comes with built in support for java server pages (using the
Jasper engine). Jetty is another server worth looking at
(http://jetty.mortbay.org) as it is built specifically to run as a
stand-alone server and has some load-balancing features built into it. Jo is
another popular java server (http://www.tagtraum.com) which comes with good
documentation. These servers are great for java applications but are not as
popular yet for general purposes although they are showing promise.

Hopefully you'll get some help from those with more experience but I thought
I'd put in my two cents in case it can help as a springboard.

Trent