Re: 2nd try: General questions about Jigsaw

At 08:01 AM 3/24/99 -0500, Marcel Maré wrote:
>I just found out about Jigsaw, and I must say it looks tempting. But it did
>raise some questions:

I've got lots of questions as well, and I'm not a W3C person, so consider
these all unofficial.  Hopefully, those in the know will correct my mistakes.

>1. Is Jigsaw a "real" webserver, iow can it be used in production
>environment? Or is it experimental?

PC Week just gave it a thumbs up that sounded like they were happy about
using it in real environments.

>2. How many people are using it? How many ISPs?

I haven't found any ISPs offering Jigsaw, though I'm pondering doing a
colocation deal.  No idea how many people are using it.

Given the W3C's position as a vendor consortium, producing a server that
competes on some level with the offerings of their members, I'm not sure
they're going to promote it for general use.  (I might, though.)

>3. What would be the benefits of using Jigsaw over Apache/Jserv?
>Performance?  

The main things I see are that you're running everything in the same JVM,
not a mix of environments, so moving your implementation (from NT to Mac to
Solaris to AS/400 to S/390) shouldn't be as difficult.  It makes it easy to
prototype on a smaller system and move it to a larger system.  Of course,
you may have JVM issues (my work currently requires Java 2, for instance)
that make this portability more difficult.

>4. I saw support for compiled pages (jthml), but that is an older
>technology. Any Java Server Pages support?

[From an earlier message:]
>Le 16:50 17/03/99 +0100, Benoit Mahe a écrit:
>>JSP is not (yet) available in Jigsaw, but the page compilation
>>documentation is at [1].
>>
>>[1] http://www.w3.org/Jigsaw/Doc/User/PageCompilation/Overview.html
>>
>>Regards, Benoit.
>

>5. How hard/easy is it to make an application server out of Jigsaw?

I don't think it would be very hard; I don't know how performance would
compare to a 'dedicated' app server, though. Lots of issues involving
thread handling, state management, and other friendly issues could come up.
 Servlets certainly make it hard to tell the difference between a Web
server and an app server, though.

I'd love to see a FAQ directed at Web Admins and other prospective Jigsaw
users to supplement the technical info we've got right now.  Is this
something I could start?

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Wednesday, 24 March 1999 08:43:04 UTC