B.1 IIS Web Server

Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) is a commonly used web server on the windows platform. From a request-serving perspective, IIS natively supports serving only static files but has the facility to execute add-ons/plug-ins. This applies to all IIS versions. These add-ons/plug-ins are configured as 'Application Mappings' on IIS and are mapped to certain resource extensions (e.g., “.jsp”). IIS simply executes the configured add-on to handle a particular resource extension whenever it is requested. IIS is not inherently J2EE compliant and therefore cannot directly deploy servlets/JSPs. Since Style Intelligence is a 100% Java tool, it can only be deployed on a J2EE compliant application server. There are many available options for Java add-ons/plug-ins, and a few of those options are discussed here.

Discrete Web Server and Reporting Server (Recommended Approach)

Since InetSoft Enterprise products are servlet based, all commands to the reporting engine are sent via a servlet (repository servlet) in the form of HTTP URL requests with appropriate parameters. It is a common practice to run your reporting server separately and simply use HTTP URLs to link to the report server. For example, your portal framework could contain simple HTML pages which have framesets pointing to the report server URL as their source. See Integrating the Web User Interface.

IIS Tomcat Redirector

A popular add-on which allows IIS to run JSPs/Servlets on Tomcat is isapi_redirect. This plug-in allows IIS to redirect requests for JSPs and servlets to a Tomcat server. It still requires you to run Tomcat's web server separately on a certain port so that JSP/Servlets can be configured and executed. It registers an ISAPI on IIS to steal JSP requests from IIS request processing, opens a connection to the Tomcat web server, and shuttles these requests to Tomcat (i.e., it proxies the request). In this case, Style Intelligence will be deployed on a Tomcat server but will receive requests from an IIS server.

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