With the release of Enterprise Server 3.0 this spring, Netscape hopes to decentralize Web-site management by shifting the responsibility for content management from the Webmaster to the content originators. The idea is to let users add documents and directories to their site
and determine access rights to the content they create from their browsers.
The new release adds full-text search features, such as automatic index updates, allowing immediate search access to newly changed data, and searches by content or by document attributes, such as author, title, and modification date. Rules-based information processing, similar to the work-flow technologies in proprietary groupware packages, will also be added in the form of intelligent agents triggered by specific events.
The LDAP protocol provides an open-directory-service interface for interoperable server management, while new distributed
administration
features allow synchronized server configuration.
As Internet commerce takes off, stronger database and transaction-processing features are needed. Stored procedures, multiple database connections, and persistent transactions are all features that Enterprise Server 3.0 will support. Native connections with Informix and Oracle databases will b
e added.
Oracle Web Application Server 3.0
Rather than attempting to enter the highly competitive Web-server market, Web Application Server (WAS) 3.0 builds on Oracle's strength in
database
technology and transaction processing to provide an infrastructure for delivering transactional applications. WAS 3.0, which ships with a Web server from Spyglass Technologies, works with most other popular Web servers (including IIS and Enterprise Server) and solves the problem of interfacing to legacy applications by isolating applications from the server. This process-isolation model forces each application to run as a separate persistent process instance, while an HTTP dispatch mechanism from the HTTP server provides the glue and plumbing.
Oracle's technology uses a CORBA-compliant Web object request broker (ORB) and cartridges that can plug into the broker to provide various back-end services to interface with Oracle SQL databases, the Java Virtual Machine, ODBC-compliant dat
abases, and other data sources. Cartridges run independently but can also communicate with applications or with other cartridges without resorting to the HTTP level. Cartridges can also be deployed across servers instead of just on the same server, as is the case with WebServer 2.1, the pre-CORBA version of WAS 3.0.
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Enterprise Server 3.0 supports remote administration from anywhere.
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WAS 3.0 uses agents to manage database transactions.
These Servers Missed the Bus
