is undertow a web server? web container? or both

[wujiee]

the release note of WildFly 8.0.0.Alpha1 abstracted as following which confused me.

===

- Switched default web container to Undertow

  (a new non-blocking high-performance web server)

===

and Unfortunately the is almost no documentation.

can anyone explain it for me?

thanks a lot.

wujie

[jaikiran]

See http://undertow.io/

[henk53]

jaikiran pai wrote:

See http://undertow.io/

"non-blocking API’s based on NIO"

[grammar nazi] Shouldn't that be "non-blocking APIs based on NIO"?

[wujiee]

In JBoss Web Server home page：http://www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/web-server/

the JBoss Web Server contains Apache Web Server, Connector(mod_proxy), and Tomcat.

and In Java EE 7 spec(JSR 342), the Web Server is defined as following.

So, I think undoertow is equals to tomcat.

[nickarls]

"non-blocking API’s based on NIO"

[grammar nazi] Shouldn't that be "non-blocking APIs based on NIO"?

And it's the implementation that's non-blocking and not the API, right? ;-)

[nickarls]

Yes, it's essentially the replacement (of JBossWeb which was an extension of Tomcat).

Not that I've considered the difference of a web container and a web server that much before.

[jaikiran]

Nicklas Karlsson wrote:

Not that I've considered the difference of a web container and a web server that much before.

Neither have I since, IMO, it's reading too much into the words. Each one has their own definition of what a web container is and what a web server is.

[jaikiran]

henk de boer wrote:

jaikiran pai wrote:

See http://undertow.io/

"non-blocking API’s based on NIO"

[grammar nazi] Shouldn't that be "non-blocking APIs based on NIO"?

The website source itself is hosted on github https://github.com/undertow-io/undertow-io-site, so please do send pull requests with fixes for such issues.

[ctomc]

杰 吴 wrote:

In JBoss Web Server home page：http://www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/web-server/

the JBoss Web Server contains Apache Web Server, Connector(mod_proxy), and Tomcat.

and In Java EE 7 spec(JSR 342), the Web Server is defined as following.

So, I think undoertow is equals to tomacat.

Undertow is both, web server & servlet container.

As in, you can use just web server without any servlets at all.

so to anwser original question yes it is both and yes it relates to tomcat in a way that replaces jbossweb (fork of tomcat) in WildFly.

--

tomaz

[atijms]

Tomaz Cerar wrote:

so to anwser original question yes it is both and yes it relates to tomcat in a way that replaces jbossweb (fork of tomcat) in WildFly.

--

tomaz

The first that came to mind when reading that was wondering how you will approach the many Tomcat Valves that are currently in use. JBoss uses them internally too for a lot of things, especially security (see https://community.jboss.org/wiki/WildFlyWebContainerSecurityUseCases).

[wujiee]

Tomaz Cerar 编写:

杰 吴 wrote:

In JBoss Web Server home page：http://www.redhat.com/products/jbossenterprisemiddleware/web-server/

the JBoss Web Server contains Apache Web Server, Connector(mod_proxy), and Tomcat.

and In Java EE 7 spec(JSR 342), the Web Server is defined as following.

So, I think undoertow is equals to tomcat.

Undertow is both, web server & servlet container.

As in, you can use just web server without any servlets at all.

so to anwser original question yes it is both and yes it relates to tomcat in a way that replaces jbossweb (fork of tomcat) in WildFly.

--

tomaz

Hi Tomaz

Thanks for your clarified reply.

and the further question as following when use undertow as web server.

how to configure the undertow and mod_cluster for http load balancing by wildfly‘s webconsole or cli as the following topology.

#there is no any related infos in wildfly’s docs.

thanks

wujie

[jameslivingston]

arjan tijms wrote:

The first that came to mind when reading that was wondering how you will approach the many Tomcat Valves that are currently in use. JBoss uses them internally too for a lot of things, especially security (see https://community.jboss.org/wiki/WildFlyWebContainerSecurityUseCases).

I've posted about that before on the undertow-dev mailing list (http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/undertow-dev/2013-April/000286.html). The answer is that it will not be compatible with Tomcat valves directly, since they have access to too much of Tomcat's internals so it. You can however write Undertow Handlers, which allow you to do the same kind of things.

Are there particular use cases and features you were using Valves to do? I did some analysis of what Red Hat sees support cases about and checked whether those things were possible in Undertow, and filed feature requests for those that were not. If there are things which you previously did with Valves that you can't figure out how to do in Undertow, it may be worth posting them here or filing a feature request for.

[ctomc]

To anwser your question about mod cluster.

Setup should be basicly the same as it was with web subsystem.

Mod cluster added support for undertow recently (i think it was in WildFly 8 alpha3)

All you need to configure is listeners (http / ajp) and it should all work automaticly.

if there are some specific issues, let us know so we can address them.

As it goes for custom valves, let us know what exactly do you need, we are planing some basic valve support just to address common migration scenarios, but as James said, this will not be full blown support as that would require us to have all tomcat's internals present.

As side note, all security releated stuff in WildFly itself has been(or in some cases is in process) rewriten to not use Valves at all...

--

tomaz

[henk53]

Tomaz Cerar wrote:

As it goes for custom valves, let us know what exactly do you need

I've seen custom valves being used for modifying each and every cookie that the server adds to the response. A Servlet filter cannot do this, since it cannot intercept things like e.g. the JSESSIONID cookie. Would be great if undertow had some universal support for this.

[ctomc]

I've seen custom valves being used for modifying each and every cookie that the server adds to the response. A Servlet filter cannot do this, since it cannot intercept things like e.g. the JSESSIONID cookie. Would be great if undertow had some universal support for this.

You can do that by writing your own handler, which can be deployed as part of your application if you want.

Take a look at Stuarts answer or similar post on how to do it Re: Authentication in RESTful application

If you mean for us to provide some general set of handlers that you could just configure, that is different story.

We do plan to add support for configuring custom handlers as part of subsystem config.

Undertow itself comes with bunch of handlers that could be configured and used, but there are plenty still missing.

We will eventually address all of them, if you have time you can contribute some

--

tomaz