Features

AOLserver Administration Features

Access Control:

AOLserver's access control system allows you to define users, assign users to groups, and set permissions for users, groups, and hosts.

When defining permissions for the AOLserver, you can specify lists of users to allow or disallow, lists of groups to allow or disallow, and hosts (specified either by host name or IP address) to allow or disallow for each method/URL combination..

See Chapter 6 for information on using the access control system.

Multi-homing:

AOLserver allows you to run multiple servers on one host by attaching them to different port and/or IP address combinations.

See the "Configuration for Multiple IP Addresses" section for information on configuring AOLserver for multi-homing.

Database Services Features

AOLserver manages pools of open connections to databases. These pools let AOLserver quickly service simultaneous database requests (without continuously opening and closing the database), and to prevent a large number of HTTP requests from overloading the system. Both the Tcl and C APIs provide access to these database pools.

See Chapter 9 for information on using databases with AOLserver and the available database drivers.

Programming Interface Features

Tcl Interface:

AOLserver can be extended using the Tcl scripting language. AOLserver provides a powerful Tcl API containing a full array of functions and primitives that give you access to all of AOLserver's core functionality and SQL databases. Tcl functions are available to interact with the connection, implement scheduled procedures, maintain state, access the sockets and threads interfaces, roll access logs, maintain permissions, access the database, and much more.

You can create scripts in a private Tcl library for each server, or in a library shared by multiple servers. Since Tcl is embedded in AOLserver, a separate process is not required to run a Tcl script, making Tcl extensions much more efficient than CGI-based extensions.

See Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 of the AOLserver Tcl Developer's Guide for information on developing Tcl scripts and Chapter 5 for information on AOLserver's Tcl API.

AOLserver Dynamic Pages (ADPs)

ADPs allow you to embed Tcl scripts directly into HTML pages. The script(s) are interpreted dynamically when the page is accessed. See Chapter 2 of the AOLserver Tcl Developer's Guide for information on developing ADPs.

C Interface:

AOLserver can also be extended with the C API. The C API lets you write your own logging routines, access control system, communications drivers, or database drivers. It provides all the necessary functions and structures you need to access AOLserver's core functionality and the database.

To use the C API, you compile your C module into a Unix shared library. AOLserver will dynamically load the module and call your initialization function.

See Chapter 2 in the AOLserver C Developer's Guide for information on developing loadable C modules and information on AOLserver's C API.

CGI Support, Including CGI File Type Activation:

AOLserver provides full CGI support. Because running a CGI program requires a separate process to be created, it is less efficient than extending AOLserver with Tcl or C.

You can configure AOLserver to look for CGI programs in a specific directory, or you can store CGI programs near the HTML files and refer to them using the .cgi file type. Any file with the .cgi extension will be interpreted as a CGI program by AOLserver. You can configure AOLserver to activate the .cgi file type in specific directories or groups of directories.

See Chapter 4 for instructions on configuring AOLserver for CGI. See Chapter 7 for information on how to extend AOLserver using CGI.