http

Description and configuration of Resin's high-performance HTTP web server.

HTTP server

This document describes how to install and run Resin "standalone" (without Apache or IIS).

Resin provides a reliable, fast Web server which can also be used as a load balancer. In our benchmarks, it serves static pages faster than Apache. For most sites, Resin is ideal because of its performance, security and reliability.

Virtual Hosts

A Resin server can serve many virtual hosts, each with its own servlets and documents. The configuration is flexible, allowing dynamic host deployment in a hosts directory or using explicit <host> tags for additional control and security, and compatibility with existing Apache sites, enabling easy upgrades and evaluation for PHP servers to Quercus.

Rewrite

When you need to rewrite an external URL to a more convenient internal format, like rewriting to *.php files, you can use Resin's rewrite capabilities. Because Resin's rewrite mechanism contains much of the same functionality as Apache's mod_rewrite, you can translate older mod_rewrite rules to Resin's rewrite tags.

Proxy Cache

Server caching can speed dynamic pages to near-static speeds. When pages created by database queries only change every 15 minutes, e.g. CNN or Wikipedia or Slashdot, Resin can cache the results and serve them like static pages. Because Resin's caching only depends on HTTP headers, it will work for any JSPs, servlet or PHP page.response.

Resin's caching operates like a proxy cache, looking at HTTP headers to compare hash codes or digests or simply caching for a static amount of time. Since the proxy cache follows the HTTP standards, applications like Mediawiki will automatically see dramatic performance improvement with no extra work. You can even cache REST-style GET requests.

Because the cache supports advanced headers like "Vary", it can cache different versions of the page depending on the browser's capabilities. Gzip-enabled browsers will get the cached compressed page while more primitive browsers will see the plan page. With "Vary: Cookie", you can return a cached page for anonymous users, and still return a custom page for logged-in users.