Abstract

As the Internet continues to grow, e-commerce has become a new way of doing business within almost every industry. Today, some popular Web sites are handling thousands--and even tens of thousands--of Web page requests per second. Web server technology is central to the current Internet client/server model, since the performance of the server directly affects the performance of the Web site using it. In this thesis, I present a survey of contemporary commercial Web servers, describe the general concepts of Web server and Servlet container, then describe my own design and implementation of a purely Java-based scalable Web server that is integrated with a Servlet container. The purpose of this Web server implementation is to provide a commercially viable, purely Java-based scalable Web server that is fully HTTP 1.1-compliant and integrated with a Servlet container that is fully compliant with the Java Servlet Development Kit (JSDK) 2.1. This Web server, the functionally equivalent to the Apache Web server, supports the latest HTTP protocol (version 1.1) and incorporates a built-in Servlet container that is the equivalent of a JServ or Tomcat Servlet container. The built-in Servlet container supports CGI scripts by using a CGI handler Servlet. The scalability of this Web server implementation considers two ways of scaling: Transparent and Redirect. In both cases, it acts as a master and can use any Web server or itself as a slave.