Steve Vinoski and Bob Ippolito discuss web development with MochiWeb and Yaws and extending Erlang with native code. Also: async I/O in Python and Node.js vs Erlang.
Security researcher Alexander Klink and Julian Wälde revealed a serious vulnerability that until recently affected the vast majority of web server. The attack only requires a single HTTP request that is specially designed to create hash code collisions in POST form data. When first discovered this attack affected Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and ASP.NET, but vendors have been working on patches.
The iisnode project is a module that adds Node support to Internet Information Server 7.0 and later. The primary role of IIS is to act as an application server for Node, much in the same way that it does for classic ASP and ASP.NET. Developers familiar with these technologies will find the feature list to be quite familiar.
The "Apache Killer" lets an attacker use a single PC to wage a denial of service attack against an Apache server. So far, the Apache development team has issued an alert and workarounds in advance of rolling out a patch for the flaw in Apache HTTPD Web Server 1.3 and 2.X, but no patches.
PostRank Labs released an open source version of their Ruby web server framework powering PostRank. Goliath, is an asynchronous server designed for speed, leveraging key features of Ruby 1.9+. Goliath creates fast web and data services not unlike node.js but sticking with what Ruby developers know..Ruby. Discover how easy it can be to create manageable server-side services with Ruby.
The authors, from Intel, offer a three pronged approach to providing secure transmission of high volume HTML traffic: new CPU instructions to accelerate cryptographic operations; a novel implementation of the RSA algorithm to accelerate public key encryption; and using SMT to balance web server and cryptographic operations. Their approach, they claim, leads to significant cost savings.
HTTP is one of the most successful protocols in the world, and more and more developers are using it to do more than drive HTML UIs. In this presentation, recorded at QCon San Francisco 2008, HTTPbis WG chair Mark Nottingham gives an update on the current status of the HTTP protocol in the wild, and the ongoing work to clarify the HTTP specification.
Bob Ippolito talks about building web services with the Erlang-based MochiWeb and the differences to the Yaws web server, the strengths of Erlang and Python, and more.
In this interview SpringSource's Filip Hanik, a key participant in the company's Apache Tomcat initiatives, explores the reasons for Tomcat's continuing popularity, what tc Server provides on top of a base Tomcat installation, and future plans for both tc Server and Tomcat.
