PageBox allows presentation to be distributed everywhere on Internet. It combines the best of traditional alternatives, subsecond response time and lower bandwidth requirement of client/server applications with development and deployment simplicity of Web Applications. You can browse its documentation here or download it in Word format, PDF format, zipped HTML or in tar-gzipped HTML

This document is relatively old now (December 2000). Though this document has been the basis of subsequent documents, we are likely now to implement Web cache interface in a slightly different way. It focus on performance enhancements and corporate needs. Since we broaden the scope of application.

The new (March 2001) Rationale document refines our objectives and scope.

Our implementation of PageBoxes is named JSPservlet.
You can find information on its implementation in a 3 part article named a Practical solution for the deployment of JavaServer Pages on Java Developer Journal.

We definitely recommend reading the article before reading the sources:

• Volume 6, issue 1 or Class loader
• Volume 6, issue 2 or Servlet support, administration and page caching
• Volume 6, issue 5 or Security, sandbox, certificate authorities and revocation lists

The diagram below shows how it works:

You install JSPservlet on your presentation servers and you store your Web Archives on a Web Server. Then you trigger the deployment of the Web Archives on the presentation servers using an administration servlet of JSPservlet.

Your Web Archives run on the same JVM but they are loaded by independent class loaders and can run in sandboxes. You can see JSPservlet as an applet container for Web Archives. The only difference is JSPservlet updates an archive only when requested by the administrator.

You can browse its documentation and its JavaDoc for more information.

The multicast function will allow JSPservlet to interact with Web Cache and the management of larger numbers of presentation servers.

We plan to support first Squid 2.3 STABLE 4 with ICP protocol.
We consider supporting also ICAP for Akamai servers and content adaptation.
We believe PageBox is particulary useful when:

• The presentation flow is big or requires processing power, which should be the case with SVG and possibly also with PDF and SWF (Flash).
• You want to adapt a presentation in a flexible way.

The availability of cache integration is slightly postponed as we prefered temporarily focus on:

1. The support of repositories through publish and subscribe with publisher.
2. On a configuration wizard, configurator.
3. A mapper allowing a PageBox to redirect requests to the closest PageBox, Mapper.
4. The support of libraries (SOAP) and Web publishing frameworks (Cocoon).
5. On the experimentation of PageBox constellations Ursa Minor.

We are commited to two things:

• first to continue enhancing the product
• second to keep free versions under GPL

If you have other needs or ideas or if you want to contribute to the project, you can send us a mail at support@pagebox.net.

We don’t plan porting to other application or embedded servers today. We found porting from Tomcat to Resin easy. It should be the same with other Application Servers. But let us know about your ports. We would be happy to make other versions available on this side.

You can download Tomcat from http://jakarta.apache.org/site/binindex.html and Resin from http://www.caucho.com/download/index.xtp.

You also need a Java 2 JDK (J2SE) that can be JDK 1.3 or 1.2.2. You can download it at Sun.

This version is designed in Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) conformant frameworks. The primary goal of the OSGi service framework is to use the Java (TM) programming language's platform independence and dynamic code-loading capability to make development and dynamic deployment of applications for small-memory devices easier.

You can find documentation on OSGi on http://www.osgi.org.

Sun provides an OSGi implementation named Java Embedded Server 2 (JES 2) on http://www.sun.com/software/embeddedserver/index.html, we used to develop the Embedded version.

We developed this version, not only to allow Web archive deployment on Home Gateway but also because its smaller footprint allows embedding JSPservlet on smaller devices.

You can browse its documentation and its JavaDoc for more information.

Both versions require disk space on JSPservlet host to store cached archives, managed archive list, keystore and policy files, log and statistics.
The diskless version doesn't write on JSPservlet host, to address smaller appliance requirements.

As a consequence:

1. JSPservlet multicasts to get the archive list at boot time.
2. It keeps the archives in memory.
3. It multicasts log messages and statistics

We chose multicast because it allows diskless JSPservlet servers to be served by many archive/statistics/log servers. However we also support multiple unicast UDP for cases where multicast cannot be used.

You can browse its documentation and its JavaDoc for more information.

Versions above require either that the archive author also administrates PageBoxes or that the author loads its archive on administrator site and let's know the administrator about where she or he wants to deploy its archive.

The compiled classes are provided with the appropriate organization.
You MUST however extract the archives and update the web.xml (Application Server) or the manifest and the property file (JES 2) according to the documentation and to your environment. You can use the Configurator to generate the web.xml.

If you have a problem, you can send a mail to support@pagebox.net.

Documentation
PDF
Word
Html .zip, .tar.gz
JavaDoc .zip, .tar.gz

Documentation
PDF
Word
Html .zip, .tar.gz
JavaDoc .zip, .tar.gz

Documentation
PDF
Word
Html .zip, .tar.gz
JavaDoc .zip, .tar.gz

Rationale Presentation News Faq Dev site Mailing lists Home
Installation Versions Constellations Device Demo Mapper Security Cocoon/SOAP Configurator
J2EE version Embedded version Diskless version Publisher Cuckoo PHP

Contact:support@pagebox.net
©2001 Alexis Grandemange   Last modified