You think your question about Jigsaw is worth entering this list ? Mail it to jigsaw@w3.org !
Jigsaw is the new W3C reference server. It's main purpose is to demonstrate new protocol features as they are defined (such as PICS), and to provide the basis for experimentations in the field of server software (such as the provided MUX prototypical implementation).
You can download Jigsaw distribution file in various formats, and using either ftp or http:
Java has a number of advantages that fit well with our purposes. It provides portable threads and garbage collection, allows for a very dynamic server architecture. It's ability to move code around may be use in future devlopment to experiment with the mobile code concept.
No so true ! Check out the performance evaluation of Jigsaw, which indicates that it performas at least as well as the CERN server.
The current version of the generic resource editor is rather terse. At this point, the resource editor will present all the declared resource attribute values and some ways to edit them. All the attributes are declared in each resource reference manual.
Resource editors is an area in which you can expect big improvement in the next release. Right now, it is recommended that you use two browser windows, one displaying the form based editor, and the other one displaying the appropriate reference manual for the resource being edited (which described all the attributes semantics).
Setting up authentication through the form based interface requires you to run through the following stages:
/Admin/Realms
.
You can of course reuse authentication realms to protect different areas
of the server.
/protected
directory resource, then you have to bring up its
editor, which will usually be available as
/Admin/Editor/protected
.
That's it ! For more informations, you may want to read through the configuration tutorial.
Jigsaw can be extended in a number of ways. Here are just three possible things you can play with, from the simplest to the complex ones:
Jigsaw implements its own persistency mechanism while RMI already
provides a way to serialize objects, why is it so, will it change ? What
Jigsaw implements in the w3c.jigsaw.resource
package
is more then then persistency. It provides both a way of serializing objects
and a way of describing what and how the object will be dumped. The
available meta-description of objects (that you can obtain through the
getAttributes
method of resources), is a central part of
Jigsaw architecture, since it offers the ability to create generic
resource editors. This is not likely to disappear.
However, Jigsaw persistency mechanism may be merged in the futur to
the RMI interface, just by providing an implementation of the
readObject
and writeObject
method through its existing
mechanism.
Anselm Baird-Smith
$Id: FAQ.html,v 1.2 1996/05/30 15:16:53 abaird Exp $