Programming web applications in direct style with the help of continuations is a much simpler, safer, modular and better-performing technology than the current dominating “page-centric” technology combining CGI scripts, active pages or servlets. This paper discusses the use of continuations in the context of web applications, the problems they solve as well as some new problems they introduce.

The success of the World Wide Web measured in terms of the number of its users and of the resulting traffic increase is only commensurate to the patience required when sitting in front of one’s computer, waiting for a document to be down-loaded. If one could identify the typical access patterns for a set of documents on a Web server, the server could use or extend the existing protocols to acco...

First we introduce VALUE, a caching policy based on document values. The document value function used by VALUE, integrates four major document access parameters: the time of the last access, the number of accesses, the size of the document and the number of document modifications. VALUE consistantly outperforms (by up to 15%) all other cache policies. However, its straightforward implementation...

In this paper, the architecture of kernel-mode and user-mode webservers and the constraints that affect their performance are studied. A set of experiments have been performed to measure and analyze performance of kernel-mode and user-mode web servers on an open source Scientific Linux CERN platform. Web servers under study include kernel-mode TUX web server and user-mode Apache web server for ...

Web servers have become increasingly powerful since they were created. The services they offer have changed as computer hardware has improved, networks have sped up and people demand more interaction for their Web browsers. Web servers perform their function well. They are built purely for one purpose, namely speed. Web servers have sacrificed some functionality by prioritizing efficiency and s...