HTTP Provider Service 

Purpose

HTTP Provider Service provides the low-level communication and transportation services for the J2EE Engine Web Container to work properly. It is a service that implements Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) version 1.1 (specified by RFC #2616).

HTTP is a request-response protocol. Based on that paradigm, HTTP Provider Service takes care of parsing the URL of the incoming HTTP requests, dispatching them to the proper J2EE Engine’s module for processing, and returning the generated responses back to the client. It provides important features to secure a robust, high performance communication infrastructure for running high-volume business Web applications.

HTTP Provider Service is a session service, that is, it runs on both dispatcher and server nodes. That allows for using load balancing algorithms and fast requests processing.

From a client’s point of view, HTTP Provider Service represents a server socket that listens for client HTTP connections to the J2EE Engine.

Integration

HTTP Provider Service is an integral part of the J2EE Engine’s Web Container. It is closely related to the Web Container Service, which represents a container that provides managed environment for running servlets and JavaServer Pages. HTTP Provider Service is the underlying communication module that transfers HTTP responses generated by Web applications’ dynamic content back to the client.

Features

Some of the most important features of the HTTP Provider Service are:

·        Supports communication through proxy environment

·        Supports multipart requests parsing

·        Integrated mechanism for heterogeneous load balancing for requests to web applications

·        Supports virtual hosting

·        Supports applying gzip transfer encoding to requests and responses to static Web resources

·        Provides efficient configurable HTTP cache

You can perform the following tasks with the HTTP Provider Service:

·        Configuring Heterogeneous Load Balancing

·        Setting up HTTP Provider Service to Accept Incoming Requests

·        Mapping Ports

·        Certificate Login When Using SSL-enabled Proxy

·        Configuring Rules for HTTP Responses Compression

·        Configuring the Zone Separator

·        Setting Timeout for Persistent Connections

·        Limiting the Length of the Requests Headers

·        Specifying the Size of the File Buffer

·        Update the HTTP Cache Content

·        Configuring the HTTP Cache

·        Configuring HTTP Responses Caching by Client Caches

·        Configure Traces and Logs for HTTP Communication

·        Managing MIME Types

·        Specifying Welcome Files

All tasks can be performed using the Visual Administrator tool. For some of them you can use either the Visual Administrator or Telnet with the corresponding shell commands for execution. For more information about the HTTP Provider Service shell commands available, see HTTP.