This white paper is intended for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Internet Presence Providers (IPPs) that provide Web hosting services. It details the current Web hosting market along with the impact Active Server Pages (ASP) is having within this market. It then presents the unique opportunity that Chili!Soft ASP provides for UNIX-based ISPs, ASPs, and IPPs to offer advanced services to this market.
In this white paper:
· The Market Challenge for ISPs
· Active Server Pages and Chili!Soft
Compatibility
Database Publishing
Extensibility
Flexibility
Scalability and Reliability
· Chili!Soft ASP Hosting Scenarios
"The Beginner"
"2nd Time Around"
"The Web Developer"
"The Portal"
· Chili!Soft ASP Value Proposition
ASP Market Strength and Momentum
Tools, tools, and more tools
Value-added Service-enabler and Retention Tool
Dedicated Hosting Flexibility
· Product and Company Overview
About ASP
About Chili!Soft
There has been a virtual explosion in the market for Web hosting services. Revenues for Web hosting are expected to rocket from $340 million in 1997 to more than $10.5 billion by 2002, according to Forrester Research, Inc., of Cambridge, MA. These projections capture the expansion and depth of the Web hosting services market: there will be continued "horizontal" growth in the absolute number of Web sites as well as "vertical" growth in the number of Web sites hosting business applications. To capture a share of this business, the ISP must provide the key Web hosting infrastructure that developers need for deploying Web applications. Supporting such services is not an easy task. Today, business Web sites are far richer than those of even six months ago, and they will continue to grow in sophistication as new technologies become commercially viable. Ideally, ISPs will be able to respond to growing demand for such services, both in terms of scalability and type of offerings, while keeping unplanned investment in their current infrastructure to a minimum.
Chili!Soft ASP offers UNIX-based Web hosting ISPs this infrastructure. It leverages the robust and scalable UNIX platform that ISPs need for deployment while offering the wealth of features and tools that make it easy for ISP customers to develop great dynamic Web sites.
Active Server Pages (ASP) has its roots as a Web application server platform included with Microsoft’s popular IIS Web Server on Windows NT. It was originally developed to harness the energy in the Visual Basic development community, making it very easy for the Visual Basic developer to transition application development to the Web. This strategy has worked; there are now more than 1,000,000 ASP developers, over 500 companies producing ASP components and applications, and approximately 25,000 public Web sites using ASP. There are over 30 development tools that generate ASP pages, supporting a wide range of development skills, from the self-taught business owner, to the full-blown Web application developer.
Chili!Soft ASP extends the ASP platform (and its momentum) to the UNIX-based Web hosting community. Available today for Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and IBM AIX, and supporting Apache, Netscape, Domino Go and O’Reilly Web servers, Chili!Soft ASP provides a robust and scalable ASP engine that can handle even the most demanding Web hosting environments. Features include:
A standard implementation of the ASP platform, including:
· Microsoft compatible server-side scripting environments of VBScript and JavaScript
· Support for the five ASP intrinsic objects: Application, Request, Response, Session and Server
· Active Data Object (ADO) with built-in connectivity to popular databases including Oracle, Sybase, Informix, MySQL and others
· Browser Capability and File System navigation components COM interface for those components written in C/C++ and recompiled on UNIX
An inherent power of ASP Web development is to enable information stored in a database to be easily displayed and manipulated through the Web. The Active Data Object (ADO) enables this by offering ASP developers an easy-to-understand, yet powerful model for this access. ASP development tools, like Microsoft FrontPage 2000 and Macromedia Drumbeat 2000, have gone a step further in offering wizards that automatically generate the ASP database script behind the scenes. ADO and these development tools combine to expose a whole new category of service for the UNIX-based ISP. Experienced ASP developers will appreciate the speed and reliability of a UNIX-hosted database, while customers without knowledge of SQL can now easily create dynamic database-driven Web sites.
ASP Components are a vital part of ASP development, allowing developers to extend the scripting environment for specific application requirements. In order to provide for this while also opening components up to cross-platform capability, Chili!Soft ASP includes an exciting Java technology that we call Chili!Beans. The Chili!Beans component enables Java class libraries to be treated as ASP components, with the only requirement being a v1.1 or greater Java Virtual Machine. Custom application logic can now be developed by Java programmers, or purchased as an off the shelf Java class, and used directly within the ASP application.
Chili!Soft ASP has a very flexible deployment model, taking into account the many ways that Web hosting can be provided today. Shared hosting environments, both virtual hardware and software, can utilize the multi-process configuration, where each ASP engine inherits the user privileges of the executing Web server. This allows the ASP environment to match the security of the Web server environment and provides a sandbox such that one ASP application is protected from another. Dedicated hosts can take full advantage of the multi-threaded configuration of the engine, providing the greatest ASP performance. Virtual server environments can use both modes, deploying multiple ASP engines in whatever configuration is required for each individual virtual server. This flexibility allows the ISP to choose what makes sense in their specific hosting environment, rather than have the software dictate that decision.
Chili!Soft ASP was engineered with the Web hosting environment in mind. Through a careful application of ASP page and object caching, as well as the pooling of database connections, the Chili!Soft ASP engine offers performance that scales almost linearly with available hardware. This scalability is visually demonstrated in the graph below where tests were run with Chili!Soft ASP and an Apache Web Server executing on a SUN Enterprise 450 Workgroup Server configured with 1,2 and 4 CPUs. This type of scalability enables the ISP to create an ASP application-hosting infrastructure that can be easily and cheaply upgraded when server loads begin to dictate end-user performance.
Chili!Soft ASP also provides additional reliability for shared hosting environments by combining its multi-process architecture with automatic process restart/process fail-over. In this configuration, ASP applications are spread across a number of child ASP processes. If one child process should fail, end-users are transferred to another process as the original process is restarted. Combining this with the rock-solid reliability of UNIX, ISPs can feel confident that they are delivering the best end-user ASP application experience available for the market today.
The following four scenarios illustrate the capabilities that Chili!Soft ASP can bring to both the Web hosting ISP and the customers they serve.
Customer wants to host a simple Web site that offers a list of products for sale and provides a way to email purchase requests to the vendor for processing.
Budget: Minimal.
Solution:
Customer ASP Tool: Microsoft’s FrontPage 2000
ISP Hosting environment: Shared
ISP platform: Chili!Soft ASP, Apache Web Server, FrontPage Extensions, MySQL Database
The customer can use FrontPage 2000 to easily create this Web site, publishing a product database that uses ASP without even having to know ASP. FrontPage creates all the necessary ASP script to publish the database, organize the site, send the e-mail and make it look professional. Chili!Soft ASP gives ISPs a chance to offer their MySQL database to a whole new range of users, not just the Web developers who know Perl.
A customer already has a static Web site that gives basic information about her business. She now wants to make the site "dynamic" by displaying a different start page for those users who have already been to the site.
Budget: Minimal
Solution:
Customer ASP Tool: Macromedia Drumbeat 2000
ISP Hosting Environment: Virtual Server
ISP Software Platform: Chili!Soft ASP, Apache Web Server
The customer can use Drumbeat’s easy to use visual editor to create ASP pages that set a "cookie" for every user that hits the site, and then check this cookie to determine what page should be delivered to this user. Chili!Soft ASP offers the ISP a platform in which rich development tools such as Drumbeat can be used by even relative newcomers to create interactive Web sites.
The customer needs to have a fully interactive site that enables his customers to buy products, chat with support people, and check on order status. They want to outsource the development and hosting of the Web site.
Budget: A Web developer’s salary
Solution:
Developer ASP Tool: Microsoft Visual InterDev
ISP Hosting Environment: Shared Server
ISP Platform: Chili!Soft ASP, Netscape Enterprise Server, Oracle Database
The developer that creates this customer’s site has many options. A Java-based e-commerce solution can be integrated by using Chili!Beans. The developer can use ADO to check the Oracle database for order status and use standard, off-the-shelf ASP script within Visual InterDev to implement the support chat area. Chili!Soft ASP enables the ISP to offer an environment where Web developers can eliminate barriers to creating great Web sites that showcase the many services an ISP can offer.
The customer has two months to deploy a new chat application within their portal service. The company expects traffic to the site to include one million individual users per day in three months.
Budget: Lots
Solution:
Developer ASP Tool: Allaire HomeSite
ISP Hosting Environment: Dedicated Server
ISP Platform: Chili!Soft ASP, Apache Web Server, Sybase Database
This company has a dilemma. They have decided that ASP is the only environment in which they can develop this application in the time required. They are worried, though, that a Windows NT/IIS server infrastructure will not support their needs as they ramp their user base. Chili!Soft ASP enables the ISP to create an offer that lets this customer build their ASP application with their favorite ASP tools, even test using NT/IIS, but do production deployment on a SUN Solaris server that can scale with their needs.
This is not a technology looking for a market, ISPs around the world get requests for ASP hosting every day. Chili!Soft ASP enables the UNIX-based ISP to tap into this hot market.
Each category of customer/developer can find a development tool that addresses their individual problem or challenge. This can be a visual tool for beginners like Macromedia Drumbeat 2000 or a truly advanced tool such as Microsoft Visual InterDev. No other environment offers the breadth of development tools that ASP does. Chili!Soft ASP is compatible with these tools and in some cases, like FrontPage 2000, has even been enhanced to support the tool’s unique ASP functionality. (See the Chili!Soft "ASP Development Tools" white paper.)
Many shared hosting customers run into a wall when developing their own Web site for hosting on UNIX. The current batch of html development tools allow them to create great looking sites, but don’t extend this to more dynamic functionality like accessing a database or uploading files. They have two ways to solve this problem: hire a developer to do this advanced work in Perl or Java, or switch to an ISP that offers Windows NT hosting and the easy-to-use tools they need. Chili!Soft ASP allows the UNIX-based ISP to retain these customers by exposing these same services through ASP, while going one step further in offering the performance and reliability of a UNIX infrastructure. As customers take advantage of this new functionality, the ISP can in turn charge for these advanced services.
Many ISPs today provide dedicated hosting on Windows NT/IIS. Customers often request this configuration is because it includes ASP. Chili!Soft enables these customers to continue to develop their application using ASP, while the ISP can deploy these same application on their standard UNIX configuration. The customers get a scalable and reliable Web site while the ISP can leverage the known benefits of a UNIX Web serving infrastructure.
ASP is an open, compile-free Web application environment that combines scripting, HTML, custom server components and robust database publishing to create dynamic Web-based business applications. With ASP, developers can build browser-independent Web solutions and publish legacy databases to the Web using tools such as Microsoft’s Visual InterDev™ and FrontPage2000™, Macromedia™ Drumbeat™, NetObjects ScriptBuilder™, or Sybase™ PowerSite. ASP is widely known for accommodating developers of varying skill sets and expertise, and for allowing corporate IT managers to more effectively allocate scarce developer resources. There are more than 1,000,000 ASP developers, over 500 companies producing ASP components and applications, and approximately 25,000 public Web sites using ASP.
Chili!Soft, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW), is a provider of enabling technologies and applications for Active Server Pages. Chili!Soft's award-winning flagship product, Chili!Soft ASP, extends the ASP framework to major Web servers and operating systems including Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Hewlett Packard HP-UX, and Linux. Chili!Soft was incorporated in 1997 with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. For more information about the company, please visit the Chili!Soft Web site at http://www.chilisoft.com or call (425) 957-1122.
Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Legal Notice.