Features - Resin and Resin Professional

Overview
Installation
Configuration
Quercus
SOA/IoC
JSP
Servlets and Filters
Admin (JMX)
EJB
Amber
Security
Performance
Hessian
XML and XSLT
Third-party
Troubleshooting/FAQ

Resin 3.1

Installation

Resin is a high-performance, scalable Java/PHP application server. We release two versions of Resin: an open source version under the GPL, and a professional version with enhanced performance, clustering, and reliability features.

About Caucho

Caucho Technology, Inc. was founded in 1998 as an engineering shop devoted to open source and high performance Java. We chose to avoid venture capital so we can have full control of our software without the pressure to sell the company or conform to large and inefficient software development models.

We have stayed true to our roots. Almost a decade since our inception, Caucho has become globally recognized leader in open source Java-PHP server technology that delivers fast and stable performance. Resin is the application server of choice for over 6,000 organizations including Fortune 500, innovative startups, government and educational institutions needing reliable and fast Java-PHP solutions.

We love performance and elegant code.

Check out Quercus, our Java implementation of PHP 5 that has been benchmarked at four to six times faster than mod_php. Since Quercus is included with Resin, you can run all your applications - web server, Java, PHP - within one open source software product that has rock solid stability, is fast and easy to configure.

More than five years ago, we introduced Hessian, an open source binary web services protocol that is being used in hundreds of applications including mobile communications and gaming today.

We have a great team of developers based primarily in San Francisco with some developers in Canada and Brazil. We are always looking for bytecode wizards to join our team and work on performance, compilers and well-organized code.

While we're known as an engineering shop, Caucho's sales, training, professional services and resellers support our customers worldwide. Hundreds of large-scale government and corporate deployments are run on Resin including CNet, Kodak, Salesforce and Japan's largest online gaming portal that take advantage Resin features including open source, early adoption of Java specifications, PHP, JNI performance enhancements and JDBC. Caucho is a Sun Microsystems Java licensee.

Resin Professional

Resin is provided in two versions, Resin Professional and Resin Open Source. Resin Professional adds features and enhancements commonly needed in a professional production environment. Resin Open Source is suitable for hobbyists, developers, and low traffic websites that do not need the performance and reliability enhancements of Resin Professional.

Reliability features

Resin Professional provides a number of reliability features, including automatic server restart, detection and restart of locked or stalled servers, and monitoring of JVM memory usage for applications with memory leaks.

Resin configuration: <ping>
Resin configuration: min-free-memory

Clustering

Clustering provides the ability for multiple servers to appear as one server to clients. Clustering provides enhanced reliability and allows sites to scale up as server demand increases,

Clustering is supported with the standalone web server, Apache, and IIS.

Resin documentation: Reliability and Load Balancing

Persistent and Distributed sessions

Persistent sessions guarantee that a server can restore the contents of the HttpSession object when it is restarted. Distributed sessions provide the ability for multiple servers in a cluster to share the values stored in the HttpSession.

Resin documentation: Persistent and Distributed Sessions

Performance enhancing native code

Resin Professional includes a native code libary on both Windows and Unix platforms. Native code is used to provide significant performance benefits in areas like socket connections, keepalive connections, and file system access.

OpenSSL

Resin Professional uses native code to link to the OpenSSL libraries, a much better and more efficient SSL solution than the Java facilities provided by JSSE.

Resin documentation: OpenSSL

HTTP proxy caching

Resin Professional provides a memory and disk based caching system for increased performance benefits. Server caching can speed dynamic pages to near-static speeds. Small but frequently accessed resources such as images and css files are cached in memory and served directly to the client, avoiding even a read from the disk.

Many pages require expensive operations like database queries but change infrequently. Resin can cache the results and serve them like static pages. Resin's caching will work for any servlet, including JSP and XTP pages.

Resin documentation: Caching
Resin configuration: <cache>

Gzip filter

Bandwidth costs are significant for many websites. The GzipFilter enables automatic compression of responses for browsers that support it. Use of the GzipFilter reduces bandwidth usage and may provide significant cost savings.

Resin documentation: GzipFilter

Web Server

Standalone

Resin documentation: Standalone web server Unix and Windows

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Operating Systems

Resin and Resin-Professional are tested and supported on the following operating systems:

Linux
Solaris
Windows
Mac OS X

Resin is known to work on the following operating systems:

AIX
HP-UX
Free-BSD

Resin is used on these operating systems, however there may or may not be difficulties with Apache integration, and the JNI code that Resin uses to increase performance may not be available.