Browsing by Author "Nyirenda, Mayumbo"

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    Open Access
    Universal web application server
    (2007) Nyirenda, Mayumbo; Suleman, Hussein
    The growth of the World Wide Web has in large part been made possible by the technologies that power it. These are the Web servers and Web browsers that many take for granted. Each has evolved to support the changing needs of users of the WWW from simple static text to highly interactive and dynamic multimedia. The Web servers, in particular, have evolved into a spectrum of different technologies to support what are now known as Web applications. These are usually installed and accessed through a Web server. Security is a problem in Web server environments and therefore the Web servers are usually run as an un-privileged user. Performance is another problem as some of these technologies require re-initialization of the execution environment with every subsequent request. These security and performance shortcomings have been dealt with by numerous Web application technologies.
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    Open Access
    X-Switch: An Efficient Multi-User Multi-Language Web Application Server.
    (2010) Nyirenda, Mayumbo; Suleman, Hussein; Maunder, Andrew James; Van Rooyen, Reinhardt
    Web applications are usually installed on and accessed through a Web server. For security reasons, these Web servers generally provide very few privileges to Web applications, defaulting to executing them in the realm of a guest account. In addition, performance often is a problem as Web applications may need to be reinitialised with each access. Various solutions have been designed to address these security and performance issues, mostly independently of one another, but most have been language or system-specific. The X-Switch system is proposed as an alternative Web application execution environment, with more secure user-based resource management, persistent application interpreters and support for arbitrary languages/interpreters. Thus it provides a general-purpose environment for developing and deploying Web applications. The X-Switch system’s experimental results demonstrated that it can achieve a high level of performance. Furthermore it was shown that X-Switch can provide functionality matching that of existing Web application servers but with the added benefit of multi-user support. Finally the X-Switch system showed that it is feasible to completely separate the deployment platform from the application code, thus ensuring that the developer does not need to modify his/her code to make it compatible with the deployment platform.