I'm trying to setup a server based on our needs for a new website. Basically, I need to build a website based on social engine, and according to the platform's requirements (found here: http://www.socialengine.net/support/documentation/article?q=152&question=SocialEngine-Requirements) it requires the webserver to be Apache based.
Now my issue comes with the addition of a web application that needs to be included in the site. The web application requires the server to be capable of Asynchronous Request Processing, and is currently only supported by Tomcat or GlassFish.
I found a couple tutorials such as this one http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/2203891/Integrating-Tomcat-with-Apache.htm that explain how to "integrate" Tomcat into Apache. Would a server running Tomcat alone be able to handle the applet needs as well as serve the Apache (assuming HTTP) needs from the Social Engine platform? Are there any hosting providers any of you would reccomend?
Although I've done alot of front end stuff before, this is the first time i have to deal with any of the back end details, so my knowledge of server side functionality is really garbage. Please let me know if I'm not asking the right questions.
Thanks
You wouldn't really be able to use Tomcat for both apps, since the other one needs PHP. It's pretty common to have both Tomcat and Apache running on the same server. You might want to look up more recent documentation on mixing them, even this but definitely have a look at mod_proxy_ajp.
What's the other application? It's a little tricky to set up Asynchronous Request Processing if you are new to server apps, but there is also a lot of documentation, so if you're game, you can probably figure it out OK. You might also want to see if that app would work with node.js (hosting info here)
If you want to set it all up yourself, you could get a virtual private server from Rackspace Cloud or similar host or get a shared host that has the required apps already set up, which would limit your ability to customize the environment and may require 2 hosting plans, but would be easier to set up. It also somewhat depends on if both apps need to be on the same machine for any reason and/or on the same domain.
A regular LAMP stack will run SE4 just fine, however, you will need to do some tuning to get the page loads under 3 seconds. You will want to remove any Apache modules that you aren't using with a2dismod. For instance, if you're not using any Ruby on the site, a2dismod ruby. This will help get memory usage under control. APC is a must.
For a much more in depth read on tuning php/apache, please read this: Performance tuning on Apache, PHP, MySQL, WordPress v1.1 – Updated
Related
I just recently moved an app from a single stack Linode configuration, to a full on Amazon configuration as such: Load balancer, multiple app server, RDS database instance.
My latency in the process went up by around 200-300ms. I understand that having the app server and database server not on the same stack, will increase latency some.
How do I go about profiling a typical request to see where all the latency comes from, preferably with a nice break down. This will allow me to optimize our weaknesses. At the end of the day I want to be back around 100-150 ms on a request.
This particular project is a Codeigniter project running on top of Apache & phpfpm.
I've had very good success in using this application https://blackfire.io/
Blackfire Profiler Fire up your PHP Apps Performance
Easy to setup and currently requires the Chrome Browser but it will give you a break down of your entire application. It also supports SAPI & CLI which is quite nice too.
It's at least a tool to help you identify where you might have some performance issues.
I am looking to develop some web app for my Android device. Found Sencha and think it might be a good tool to try out.
I suppose I would need to find a web server to host the Sencha app to run the app? What kind of web server is needed? I suppose one that able to run HTML5, CSS, Javascript is enough?
Can anybody recommend one (free one)?
Thanks.
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Thanks for the answers to the above post. I am new to this stuff, so got some more follow-up and somewhat related questions:
1) I read from the Sencha site that the app can be developed locally using things like XAMPP installed on local Windows PC. Question -- Why need this local host when I can just use an external Web Host?
2) It was also mentioned that for Windows may not need XAMPP if Window's Internet Information Server (IIS) is already running. How do I know if my computer is running this and so don't need to install another local server? (I asking this because I had installed an XAMPP before on another computer and things got quite messed up and so I want to avoid doing it if possible).
3) Once I got a web host, to have an app running, I would just have to have the JS files in the web host together with the Sencha framework right? If so, then I don't understand what is meant by "Build" in the Sencha documentation.
Thanks.
Sencha Touch is a client side framework, therefore there are no server side requirements. That said, any web host should do.
However, I'll go ahead an make a recommendation... a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySql) will work the best. Of course you can substitute any of the stack for something of your favor, this setup seems to be the most favorable. Some of my colleagues utilize Ruby/RoR instead of PHP, so as you can see it is quite flexible in terms of environment.
When searching for a hosting provider, do your research and select something that fits with your budget but still gives you the best bang for your buck. Be sure to ask them questions!
Tip: Make sure you have access to your web server's configuration file so you can add mime_types and make other mobile oriented tweaks if needed.
First you must know that HTML5, CSS and Javascript are all front end stuff that do not count when you talk about Hosting. These are taken care of by the client agent (browser).
What really matters is your server side language: PHP, Python(Django), Ruby, etc.
So it mainly doesn't matter which framework, as much as which language that framework use.
This is a generic answer that will help you decide not only in terms of Sencha but for any other framework.
Take for instance WordPress. It uses PHP and MySQL, so first I look if my Web host supports Mysql and PHP and in general this would be enough to know that I can use if for my WordPress site.
And by the way, most Web host companies allow you to ask them questions before buying. So go ahead and question them about anything that concerns your requests.
Sencha provides an app hosting service through its Sencha.io cloud services.
I have a website running on CentOS using the usual suspects (Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Since the time this website was originally launched, it has evolved quite a bit and now I'd like to do fancier things with it—namely real-time notifications. From what I've read, Apache handles this poorly. I'm wondering if I can replace just Apache with Node.js (so instead of "LAMP" it would "LNMP").
I've tried searching online for a solution, but haven't found one. If I'm correctly interpreting the things that I've read, it seems that most people are saying that Node.js can replace both Apache and PHP together. I have a lot of existing PHP code, though, so I'd prefer to keep it.
In case it's not already obvious, I'm pretty confused and could use some enlightenment. Thanks very much!
If you're prepared to re-write your PHP in JavaScript, then yes, Node.js can replace your Apache.
If you place an Apache or NGINX instance running in reverse-proxy mode between your servers and your clients, you could handle some requests in JavaScript on Node.js and some requests in your Apache-hosted PHP, until you can completely replace all your PHP with JavaScript code. This might be the happy medium: do your WebSockets work in Node.js, more mundane work in Apache + PHP.
Node.js may be faster than Apache thanks to it's evented/non-blocking architecture, but you may have problems finding modules/libraries which substitute some of Apache functionality.
Node.js itself is a lightweight low-level framework which enables you to relatively quickly build server-side stuff and real-time parts of your web applications, but Apache offers much broader configuration options and "classical" web server oriented features.
I would say that unless you want to replace PHP with node.js based web application framework like express.js then you should stay with Apache (or think about migrating to Nginx if you have performance problems).
I believe Node.js is the future in web serving, but if you have a lot of existing PHP code, Apache/MySQL are your best bet. Apache can be configured to proxy requests to Node.js, or Node.js can proxy requests to Apache, but I believe some performance is lost in both cases, especially in the first one. Not a big deal if you aren't running a very high traffic website though.
I just registered to stackoverflow, and I can't comment on the accepted answer yet, but today I created a simple Node.js script that actually uses sendfile() to serve files through the HTTP protocol. (The existing example that the accepted answer links to only uses bare TCP protocol to send the file, and I could not find an example for HTTP, so I wrote it myself.)
So I thought someone might find this useful. Serving files through the sendfile() OS call is not necessarily faster than when data is copied through "user land", but it ends up utilizing the CPU and RAM less, thus being able to handle larger number of connections than the classic way.
The link: https://gist.github.com/1350901
Previous SO post describing exactly what im saying (php + socket.io + node)
I think you could put up a node server on somehost:8000 with socket.io and slap the socket.io client code into tags and with minimal work get your existing app rocking with socket.io (realtime baby) without a ton of work.
While node can be your only backend server remember that node likes to live up to it's name and become a node. I checked out a talk awhile back that Ryan Dahl gave to a PHP Users's group and he mentioned the name node relating to a vision of several node processes doing work and talking with each other.
Its LAMP versus MEAN nowadays. For a direct comparison see http://tamas.io/what-is-the-mean-stack.
Of course M, E and A are somewhat variable. For example the more recent koa may replace (E)xpress.
However, just replacing Apache with Node.js is probably not the right way to modernize your web stack.
I'm looking to install Railo in the same way we currently do for Adobe CF.
At present we run Adobe CF8 on top of JRUN 4, in a multiple instance setup. On our local sandboxes we use Apache as the web server. We then use Apache Virtual Directories to point to our codebase which exists outside of the CF Context. This gives us ultimate flexibility in that we can be running multiple servers, multiple sites, from anywhere location on our machines. In Production we use IIS 6, but the above still applies.
All the documentation that I've come across to date has not yet been able to emulate this. I've tried combinations of JBoss, Railo WAR, Apache, JkMount, Resin, JRUN, etc.
Things we are trying to avoid: We don't want Tomcat to be involved (duplicating the web server requirement), we don't want to have to configure anything in JBoss per new site (as well as Apache), we need our codebase to be run from any location.
Has anyone successfully managed to emulate this approach for Railo? Could you point me in the right direction, or could a representative from Railo write a blog post for it?
Thanks in advance!
Dave
The ability to install several instances of Railo or CF is not a Railo or CF feature but one of the application server. Railo has the great built in Sandbox security for each defined web context. A web context normally is aligned with a virtual host setting in the app server. Since in Adobe CF there is only one web context something like the sandbox security needs to be applied.
Anyway, different application servers (like Resin) allow you to use regular expressions for virtual hosts definition (this means that the web contexts are created on the fly and implicitly) or single conf files in a certain directory for each web context you want to create. After this has happened the settings for your different applications running in the different web contexts are separated from each other. Security at its best.
You can have your webroots located wherever you like. The only thing that does not work is that you create a virtual directory in Apache or IIS and then your application already runs in there as well. BUT what you can do in Railo is to create a mapping that is called identically and that points to the exact same location. Then you can use it exactly as in CF.
We might even consider to read the virtual directories from the web servers and implicitly create the corresponding mappings. In addition you could create per application mappings in order to solve that problem.
If you have any other questions, just email our Railo google group.
Gert Franz
Railo Professional Open Source
gert (at) getrailo.com
Here is a blog post on setting up Railo in JRun. Sean would be the guy to ask about this too if you have any more problems.
Sorry for my ignorance here, but when I hear the word webserver, I immediately imagine Apache, although I know people use Microsoft's IIS too. However since I've been hanging out here at Stackoverflow I've noticed lots of people use Glassfish.
Which made me wonder, why would I want to use Glassfish (in the sense that I'm interested, but I don't really understand why it might make my life easier). From what I read it's Sun's open-source derivate of Apache's Tomcat, thus I imagine it's a good (or great) quality product. But since I don't know its strengths and weaknesses, I don't know when it would be wise to choose Glassfish over another server. Could anyone elaborate ?
GlassFish is an Application Server which can also be used as a Web Server (Http Server).
A web Server means: Handling HTTP requests (usually from browsers).
A Servlet Container (e.g. Tomcat) means: It can handle servlets & JSP.
An Application Server (e.g. GlassFish) means: It can manage Java EE applications (usually both servlet/JSP and EJBs).
You should use GlassFish for Java EE enterprise applications.
The need for a seperate Web server is mostly needed in a production environment. You would normally find a Application server to be suffice most of your development needs. A web server is capable of holding larger number of active sessions and connections, thus providing the necessary balance without performance costs.
Stick to a simple web server if you are only working with servlets/jsps. It is also to be noted that in a netbeans environment, glassfish has better support than other App servers. In the context of eclipse though, WSAD and JBoss seem to the preferred options.
Glassfish will soon release the modular kernel.
This means that the containers you need start up and shutdown as you need them. I.e no EAR deployed, EJB container won;t start up. This seems to have made it very good for development as it can start and stop very quickly. This takes it a lot closer to development environments like Rails (where redeployment is a massive part of your development)
I have used GlassFish server for developing Web Services.
It provides a very interactive Admin Console where admin can test the Web Services.
I really find it helpful while developing Web Services