HP has added the Secure Version of the Open Market Web Server for HP 3000s to its product lineup, enabling HP 3000 sites to enforce some of the best security measures in the world of Web servers.
Secure Web Server starts at $2,200, a modest increase from the $1,680 list price for Web Server without security. Top end of the Secure product is $5,000, with seven tiers covering CPUs in size from Series 918 to Series 996/800. HP is letting customers upgrade from the regular Web Server product to the Secure Web Server, applying a discount of 50 percent of what you paid for the original version to the price. HP is the only place to get a version of Web Server without security, since Open Market stopped selling that version several months ago.
Secure Web Server supports both SSL client authentication and Microsoft's PCT security scheme, and Open Market touts the product as being "browser independent." Open Market doesn't make a browser. Open Market likes to contrast its server with others which that support only proprietary security protocols, saying the range of support for browsers is greater with its product.
Secure Web Server also includes FastCGI, a new extension to Common Gateway Interface (CGI) that provides high performance for Internet applications without the limitations of Web server APIs. The extension improves speed of CGI execution and can distribute its applications over a network. Open Market says that FastCGI makes it possible to connect existing corporate systems that do not run Web servers to the Web. The company has additional information about FastCGI at its Web site.
While HP placed the Open Market server in its lineup, the CSY labs developed demonstration portions of a TurboIMAGE package for Java. The package was developed to show how to access a TurboIMAGE database from Java, as well as how to call any MPE Intrinsics. The package is not fully developed; only enough portions have been implemented to provide a working demo. HP noted that code is freely available to anyone wishing to take over the development of this package.
HP's sample application shows how the TurboIMAGE package would be used by a developer. This application opens a database and serially reads one of the datasets. The sample application consists of a main program and a class to represent the dataset.
HP also made available though its Jazz Web server an Alpha-2 release of the Java Developer's Kit (JDK), including the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (awt) and AppletViewer utility. The release means all components of JDK 1.0.1 are now available for MPE/iX. A beta release of JDK 1.0.1 is expected to be released before the end of 1996.
HP is going straight on to JDK 1.1, skipping a port of JDK 1.0.2. HP's Mike Yawn reports that he will begin porting of JDK 1.1 early in 1997.
Middleware efforts continue to advance for Java on the HP 3000. Alfredo Redo of Adager said the ADBC concept, which creates a high-speed pipeline between HP 3000 TurboIMAGE databases and Java applications, "encompasses a wide category of direct communications between a client and an IMAGE database, totally bypassing ODBC, JDBC and related layers.
"This, naturally, is not a be-all, cure-all approach," Rego explained. "ODBC and JDBC have their place and, to be an effective database server, IMAGE/SQL must support the 'generally accepted' standards."
For higher-performance applications, however, Rego sees ADBC as a must. "I don't see ADBC as being in competition with JDBC/ODBC, just as I don't see the IMAGE intrinsics as being in competition with SQL," he said. "It's all a matter of priorities -- and therefore, of choices." The ADBC project has produced working demos and continues at several sites.