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Welcome to the Alaska Web Application Adaptor (WAA). With this application server development kit, you have chosen an advanced server architecture based on the leading 32-bit multi-threading technology of the Alaska Xbase++ application development tool. WAA not only lets you integrate your database applications with the Internet (Web) very easily, it also solves a major shortcoming of Common Gateway Interface (CGI)-based Web applications: scalability.

In CGI-based Web applications, the application is an executable file which is launched on the Web server once a client station requests an application. If many client stations request the same application at the same time, a heavy workload is created on the server. This again leads to either a poor response time or a high memory requirement on the server side, or both. Thus, the response time of CGI-based Web applications rapidly deteriorates with the number of clients connected to the Web application server.

With the Alaska WAA, a Web application resides in a DLL file, rather than an EXE file. WAA loads a DLL file once and is then ready for client connections. Each time a client makes a request for an application, the WAA server fulfills it in a different thread. This way, server memory is reserved for data required by the client connection, while memory for the application logic remains shared for all client connections. Therefore, the WAA approach leads to a drastically reduced memory requirement on the server. In turn, the response time of the Web server becomes dependent on the complexity of the Web application, or complexity of the application logic, rather than the number of client connections. Also, the multi-threading technology provides for a truly scalable server architecture where the server performance can be increased by using SMP rather than by increasing memory.

Requirements

WAA requires the following, properly installed and running, items: