Apple & Apache: a New Standard in Web Service
The world’s most popular Web server now on the world’s most popular Web
creation platform
Caching proxy Web service and virtual hosting now available on Macintosh
Santa Barbara, CA, May 12, 1997. Tenon Intersystems today
announced shipment of WebTen, an industrial-strength, high-performance
Apache Web server for Power Macs. WebTen 1.0 takes advantage of Tenon’s
unique “UNIX virtual machine” technology to support the widely acclaimed
Apache Web server as a double-clickable Macintosh System 7 application.
Apache runs in Tenon’s multi-threaded, pre-emptive multitasking
environment, and has been extended with support for WebStar plug-ins and
AppleScript CGIs. This dual strategy of supporting both Apple and UNIX Web
extensions gives WebTen the largest family of CGIs of any known Web server.
WebTen uses Tenon’s advanced TCP stack to provide ‘true’ virtual hosting
and includes caching proxy Web service. These advanced features, coupled
with WebTen’s top performance and WebTen’s browser interface, create a new
standard in Web serving for Apple. Tenon’s new offering joins the world’s
most popular Web creation platform (Apple) with the world’s most popular
Web server (Apache).
WebTen is the fastest Web server on Power Macintosh. WebTen can
sustain up to 10,000 connections a minute, or over 10 million connections a
day. WebTen’s Apache makes use of Squid – high-performance caching and
http accelerator software – to offload the server and further advance
Apache’s already top performance. WebTen can also be configured as a
caching proxy FTP or HTTP server, reducing local browser access time as
well as bandwidth consumption.
WebTen is based on the latest Apache 1.2 with Tenon extensions.
Apache 1.2 is fully compliant with HTTP/1.1, which allows for greater
performance and efficiency when transferring files. HTTP/1.1 supports
“content negotiation” to allow different versions of a single document
(e.g., English or French, html or pdf), and “persistent connections” or
“keep alive” to give a faster response when a large number of documents are
requested over a single connection. In addition, Apache server-side
include (SSI) and extended server-side include (XSSI) directives, by
embedding special commands in HTML documents to set variables and test
conditions, lets users create dynamic Web pages without having to write CGI
scripts.
Tenon’s Apache extensions enable WebTen to support WebStar 2.0
Plug-Ins and Macintosh AppleScript CGIs, as well as standard Apache
modules, industry-standard Perl script, shell script, and application
program-based CGIs. This duality – support for both Apple and UNIX
plug-ins and CGIs – gives WebTen users the best of both worlds. Because
WebTen’s multitasking execution environment is based on Rhapsody kernel
APIs and supports Rhapsody TCP sockets, Tenon’s enhanced Apache will easily
transition to Apple’s next-generation Rhapsody OS.
WebTen supports ‘true’ virtual hosting. This is made possible by
Tenon’s advanced TCP stack, which can replace Open Transport and provide
features and performance not yet available with Open Transport. Virtual
hosting lets ISPs and Web providers support multiple Web servers on a
single machine – each with different host names, IP addresses, and URLs –
and have them appear to be completely separate sites. With WebTen &
Tenon’s TCP stack, a Macintosh can support multiple physical interfaces and
each interface can have many IP addresses. In situations where IP
addresses are not readily available, WebTen’s ‘named’ virtual host feature
allows the use of the same IP address for multiple virtual hosts.
Apache has been designed with security in mind. Since WebTen is a
Macintosh application, it doesn’t suffer from known UNIX security
vulnerabilities. The only UNIX daemon that WebTen supports is the Apache
httpd. Because the Apache sources are publicly available, and because it
is the most widely deployed Web server, Apache has received extensive
attention in the area of security. When running Apache with Tenon’s TCP
networking libraries, WebTen is less vulnerable to denial-of-service
attacks than WebStar, since Tenon’s TCP has been modified to resist the
“syn” and “ping-of-death” attacks. A WebTen “security kit” that adds SSL
support will be available this quarter. Using SSL with virtual hosts is
only possible using Tenon’s TCP stack and IP-based virtual hosting.
WebTen’s upcoming SSL option will, for the first time, allow Macintosh
Webmasters to set up secure connections for virtual hosts. Other supported
security features include the ability to “allow or deny” site access based
on IP address, subnet mask, domain name, or URL, support for “realms” to
allow user name and passwords to be applied to specific files or
directories, and the ability to limit CGI applications to specific
directories.
WebTen’s Web-based browser interface enables local or remote
administration via your favorite browser. Extensive logging options are
available, using Macintosh plug-ins or the built-in features of Apache.
WebTen 1.0 is available for U.S. $495 via download on the Internet at:
(http://www.tenon.com/products/webten) WebStar 2.0 customers can purchase
WebTen for $295 until May 31st.
Tenon has been shipping award-winning UNIX, X , and internet
software for the Macintosh since 1991. Since Apple’s NeXT acquistion,
Tenon has extended their unique “UNIX virtual machine” technology to
produce a set of “Rhapsody-Ready” internet applications. WebTen is the
first offering in this series.
Anita Holmgren
Tenon Intersystems 805-963-6983
1123 Chapala Street anita@tenon.com
Santa Barbara, CA 93101 http://www.tenon.com