Managing the Web Server

As a J2EE-compliant servlet engine, WebLogic Server is able to serve dynamic content through servlets, filters, JSPs, and custom tag libraries. It supports multiple web applications, each providing a distinct piece of functionality, and each having access to an array of configured enterprise services. It supports robust server-side session-state management, which is vital for constructing rich enterprise applications that use a client browser as their interface. It provides standard web authentication mechanisms to log in users and provides a secure operating environment. As a full-featured HTTP server, WebLogic also can be used as the primary web server for static content such as HTML pages, applets, images, multimedia files, etc.

WebLogic Server can do a lot more than just serve the static file contents of a web application. It supports many features found in other web servers, such as multiple virtual hosts, whereby a single WebLogic Server instance or cluster can host multiple web sites. Even though each logical web server has its own hostname, Domain Name Service (DNS) may map each of them to the same IP address (or cluster IP address). WebLogic extracts the hostname from the HTTP request headers, and redirects the request to the appropriate "web site." The same web application can then be targeted to multiple virtual hosts, as if it were deployed on separate web servers. In this chapter, we look at how to configure the web server and HTTP protocol, and how to create multiple virtual hosts. We also will look at how you can configure the logging of HTTP requests.

WebLogic Server also can integrate with other web servers, such as the Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft's IIS, and the NES. You can proxy HTTP requests for static content through WebLogic to another web server. Alternatively, you can install a native plug-in (provided by your WebLogic distribution) on the web server so that the web server forwards requests for servlets and JSPs to a WebLogic server or cluster. We examine both of these scenarios in this chapter.

We'll also see how a plug-in can function like the HttpClusterServlet, described in Chapter 2. In this case, it acts not only as a proxy, but also as a load balancer that takes into account server failure.