NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER:
MARK GIBBS ON WEB APPLICATIONS
Today's focus: A Virtuoso of a
server
By Mark
Gibbs
One of the bigger drags of Web applications
development is that building a system of even modest complexity is
a lot like herding cats - you need a database, an applications
server, an XML engine, etc., etc. And as they all come from
different vendors you are faced with solving the constellation of
integration issues that inevitably arise.
If you are lucky, your integration results in a
smoothly functioning system. If not, you have a lot of spare parts
flying in loose formation with the risk of a crash and burn at any
moment.
An alternative is to look for all of these
features and services in a single package but you'll find few
choices in this arena.
One that is available and looks very promising is
OpenLink's Virtuoso (see links below).
Virtuoso is described as a cross platform (runs
on Windows, all Unix flavors, Linux, and Mac OS X) universal server
that provides databases, XML services, a Web application server and
supporting services all in a single package.
OpenLink's list of supported standards is
impressive and includes .Net, Mono, J2EE, XML Web Services (Simple
Object Application Protocol, Web Services Description Language,
WS-Security, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration),
XML, XPath, XQuery, XSL-T, WebDav, HTTP, SMTP, LDAP, POP3, SQL-92,
ODBC, JDBC and OLE-DB.
Virtuoso provides an HTTP-compliant Web Server;
native XML document creation, storage and management; a Web
services platform for creation, hosting and consumption of Web
services; content replication and synchronization services; free
text index server, mail delivery and storage and an NNTP
server.
Another interesting feature is that with Virtuoso
you can create Web services from existing SQL Stored Procedures,
Java classes,
C++ classes, and 'C' functions as well as create
dynamic XML
documents from ODBC and JDBC data
sources.
This is an enormous product and implies a serious
commitment on the part of adopters due to its scope and range of
services.
Virtuoso is enormous by virtue of its
architectural ambitions, but actual disk requirements
are