Product Reviews

Hot on the heels of ResNova's personal Web for One server comes its fully-featured Internet server. This is not designed or priced for the individual user, as it is capable of competing with the most sophisticated software on the Mac and other platforms.

On launching Boulevard you are taken through a set of dialogs which allow you to have a Web server up and running in a couple of minutes. Once it's running, the program's status window shows the number of hits, most popular documents and recent clients' IP addresses.

Boulevard has complete support for users and groups, which can either be separate or linked to the Users and Groups defined in File Sharing. It is also possible to control access to individual directories and files based on the enquiring machines' address on the Internet. Other features allow control of various logging options and the interpretation of various types of files. But it is Boulevard's less visible features that make it interesting.

When the first Web servers were developed, extra functionality was provided by Common Gateway Interface applications (CGIs). These are programs which are executed in response to some request, such as the submission of a form, and which then produce some action on the server as well as generating HTML. Unfortunately, they require extra resources either to launch or communicate with some other program every time the action occurs.

By contrast, Boulevard implements internally a number of functions generally associated with CGIs. For example, there is built-in support for clickable image maps and counters. The latter can show the number of times

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a page has been accessed using a non-standard HTML tag, , which the server replaces with a number when the page is downloaded. The inspection of pages for these special tags is set globally for the server, either by telling it to look at all pages or only those with names ending in .incl.

Server-side parsing of Web pages in this way does represent an overhead on busy servers, but it's probably no worse than that associated with CGI programs. However, these tags and other tags are unique to Boulevard, which makes HTML pages designed for Boulevard less portable.

On top of these straightforward facilities there is a simple and powerful system for forms. This allows a page author to specify a form template which will replace its own pre-defined information with user-specified information when activated via, for example, a send button. This will simplify some form processing but it can't, for example, write the contents of a form to a file.

As well as implementing more functionality in the server, there are two other features designed to improve performance. The server makes full use of the new Open Transport interface which is much faster, particularly on PowerPC systems, than MacTCP. A cache is built into the server, allowing it to quickly send out recently accessed documents. It is also possible to prime this cache with documents when configuring the server.

The server worked well on a PowerPC machine with Open Transport 1.1.1b7, and seemed capable of handling a number of concurrent requests. Despite running a beta test server on a beta copy of Open Transport, it proved very reliable.

Boulevard Internet Server can be maintained remotely and supports the Put option provided by some browsers, such as Netscape Navigator Gold, which allow users to upload documents to a Web site. If the server hosts a number of user directories, these can be given separate permissions and quick access can be provided by giving the directory a name such as ~Simon.

Boulevard will be worthy of further inspection when it is finally released. But it may have little time to consolidate a market position with Apple's soon-to-be-launched FutureShare server software.