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WebObjects HTTP Adaptors

A key part of WebObjects administration involves dealing with adaptors. This section provides a little background material on what a WebObjects HTTP adaptor is, how it works, and how you can configure it to suit your needs.

A WebObjects HTTP adaptor (called WebObjects adaptor or sometimes HTTP adaptor ) routes client requests processed by an HTTP server to WebObjects applications and returns the response to the server, which sends them back to the client. WebObjects makes available several adaptors, of which only one can be active with a particular server at a time. Every transaction with a WebObjects application uses the currently active adaptor.

The relationships between adaptor and application are, potentially, many-to-many. Multiple instances of the same WebObjects application can run on the same machine or on a variety of machines and communicate with the same adaptor. In addition, multiple HTTP servers can be running on the same machine or on different machines; each server can have its own adaptor, each with its own constellation of application instances. Although there can be only one active HTTP adaptor per HTTP server, an application can concurrently communicate with other types of adaptors, such as an adaptor that uses Distributed Objects or a secure-socket adaptor.

There are two general types of HTTP adaptors, CGI adaptors and API-based adaptors. When WebObjects is installed, the CGI adaptor is made active by default. To use an API-based adaptor, you must specifically activate it. Activating the API-based adaptor deactivates the CGI adaptor for a particular server. To activate an API-based adaptor, build and install it using the instructions found in BuildingInstructions.html and InstallationInstructions.html (both are located in   NEXT_ROOT /Developer/Examples/WebObjects/Source/Adaptors/ ).

CGI Adaptors

API-based Adaptors

Installable HTTP Adaptors

Configuration Files

Automatic Discovery of WebObjects App Servers

Web Server Adaptor Configuration File Format