WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Understanding Proxies

Even though WebLogic Server can operate as a full-featured HTTP 1.1 server, its real power lies in its ability to serve dynamic content through servlets and JSPs. A number of companies have adopted commercial web servers to host their corporate web sites. WebLogic provides integration with these web servers in the form of a web server proxy plug-in. This plug-in allows the web server to communicate with the WebLogic Server (or cluster). You then can have the web server serving up the usual static content, while it passes requests for JSPs and servlets to WebLogic. A proxy plug-in offloads the task of serving static content to a commercial web server.

Here are the various architectural scenarios you should consider:

• You could use WebLogic’s built-in web server as your primary HTTP server, eliminating the need for other web servers.

• You can have WebLogic Server act as the primary HTTP server and servlet engine; additionally it proxies through certain requests for static requests to a commercial web server.

• You can have a commercial web server acting as your primary HTTP server; additionally it transparently proxies requests for servlets and JSPs through to WebLogic.

The choice of which configuration you adopt is largely dependent on the type of content being served up, the performance of the various HTTP servers, and other deployment parameters. For instance, if you are serving up mostly dynamic content (using JSPs and servlets), a pure WebLogic solution should ...