Friday 19 November 2010

MOD_ISAPI on OpenVMS V01 Released

BC&JA are happy to announce the first version of MOD_ISAPI on OpenVMS. The release notes contain a wealth of information on the software, the installation and typical uses. The kit contains examples for you to try if you feel so inclined.
Kits may be requested for Integrity and Alpha Servers by sending an email to brett.r.cameron(AT)gmail.com and johndapps(AT)gmail.com. Please state platform and operating system in your request. In addition, we would love to hear how you get on with the product and what you intend using it for.

A few words from the release on MOD_ISAPI:

ISAPI (Internet Server API) dates back many years, and was one of the earlier methods used by web servers to provide something more efficient that CGI (Common Gateway Interface) for interfacing with other programs. It was (and still is) used by Microsoft’s IIS web server and it was supported by the Purveyor Web server on both Windows and OpenVMS (unfortunately Purveyor is no longer supported). ISAPI functionality is available for Apache 2.1 via the MOD_ISAPI module, which has been ported to OpenVMS (Alpha and Integrity).
A port of MOD_ISAPI is also available upon request for Apache 1.3 on OpenVMS. ISAPI applications have a number of advantages over external CGI applications. For example, they are loaded into and run in the web server's process space, thereby eliminating the time and resource demands of creating additional processes. In addition, all data and resources available to the web server are also available to the ISAPI pplication. The primary disadvantage in using an ISAPI application is that a bug in the application can potentially impact the operation of the web server, and applications should therefore – like any other
application – they should not be deployed into production without thorough testing.