Jed has some nice things to say about Sun Web Server. In his nice things he also shows three tricks that are a pain to set up in other servers including use of the lookup() function to allow content owners to control expires headers for various content, URL rewriting, and conditional reverse-proxying to a back-end system.
See? SEE? More people should use this server. It's full of awesome.
It looks like Sun is actually updating the code for Open Web Server! Hooray!
The original release, Open Web Server 1.0, was derived from Sun Web Server 7.0 Update 3. With the most recent update Sun has merged the bug fixes and enhancements from Sun Web Server 7.0 update 4 and Update 5 into Open Web Server. Yay!
A small reminder to myself that a default installation of CentOS 5.3 does not, by default, include the Compat packages. The effect this has on Web Server is an installation that appears to have succeeded (bits are laid down on disk), but is completely unconfigured (no default instance or Admin instance are created). Re-running the installation and actually reading the screens shows an error:
Product Status Information
1. Sun Java System Web Server Configuration Failed View log file
Looking at the error logs shows this:
In one capacity or another I've been working on or with the same product since summer of 1997. When working at Verity a good number of our customers were using the Verity Search engine with Netscape Enterprise Server 2.0 and the just released 3.0. When Verity announced that the support department was to be cut at the end of the year I made a smooth transition to Netscape.
Here are the steps I had to go through to make Drupal 6.x work with (Sun|Open) Web Server (these are in addition to the normal Drupal installation steps documented by the Drupal project.
