by David Strom

When it comes to having a full family of web server products, few vendors can compete with Process Software. This month the company added a new version 1.2 to its venerable (at least in web-years) NT server and began testing a beta version of its NetWare WebServer. However, like many real-life families, upbringing can account for much and indeed, the NetWare server is definitely the poor relations from the other side of the tracks.

The NT server is definitely worthy of a coming-out party, particularly if you are going to be doing a great deal of remote administration of your servers across the Internet. If you wanted to get serious about web services and the Verity search engine was attractive, Process has included a copy of it in version 1.2. As to the NetWare version, it is not much of an improvement over the web server that Novell offers.

Process' NetWare WebServer has some promising features, especially when you first compare it to Novell's own web server. Purveyor is easier to setup and administer than Novell's, since you can perform many common tasks at either the NetWare console or with Windows. In addition, Purveyor runs on all versions of NetWare from 3.12 upwards, including 4.x (Novell's runs on 4.1 or better only) and Purveyor's server supports proxies for web, ftp and gopher services: Novell's does not.

However, these promising features don't really stand up when you dig deeper, and indicate the relative immaturity of the Purveyor NetWare product when it is compared to either Novell's or Process' own NT servers. Let's take administration as an example. Rather than using the elegant forms-based interface of its NT cousin, the NetWare Purveyor borrows a page from the "Notepad" interface: information is presented as if it were a text file printed on screen. Indeed, once you get the hang of it, you might just as well edit the PURVEYOR.INI file with Notepad yourself, since the administration tool doesn't do much more. The logging features of the NetWare Purveyor are very limited, and indeed you have almost no control over this very important function. (In contrast, Purveyor's NT cousin offers a great deal of log control.)

Both products have almost the same documentation, although the NetWare manuals are an improvement over the NT version. However, neither compares with the O'Reilly WebSite book that comes with its software. (see IW, 2/5/96)

Another difference between the two servers: in NT, Purveyor adds its own menu to Windows' File Manager to handle how access controls are managed. (Access controls are a way for webmasters to allow different users to have different views of the web.) This is a nice graphical solution. With the NetWare version, you have to manually create a text file and place it in the appropriate place, which is inferior to Novell's own system of using NetWare's own Directory Services to do the job properly.

Finally, the Purveyor NetWare server only supports files with 11-character DOS file names, even though the NetWare file system supports longer file names. This is a minor nit to pick, but shows again how far the product has to go.

I'd love to say something about the relative performance of the NetWare server with other servers, however the code is being changed and new versions are coming fast and furious, so it is hard to make any particular claims.

Process Software helped develop the Internet Server API with Microsoft, and these APIs are part of their NT WebServer product. They are not part of the shipping NetWare product, although Process plans on including it as an upgrade later this summer. This API is supposed to help build high-performance web servers and enables corporate developers to write their own dynamic linked libraries to extend functionality. However, few web servers support it yet (Microsoft's free NT-based Internet Information Server, which began shipping this past month as well, is another.)

If you need a NetWare web server, this isn't going to satisfy you for long. In the meantime, the NT version is reasonable, especially for those webmasters that have to administer many servers remotely and don't want to use another NT machine to do so: since the administration tool runs as a series of web forms, you can use any browser to accomplish the task. If you need to run a web server on something other than an Intel platform, Purveyor does have an Alpha version (and Microsoft's IIS comes on all three CPUs.) For all other uses, I'd continue to recommend WebSite.

Process Software Corp.

Framingham, MA

800 722 7770

508 879 6994

508 879 0042 (fax)

http://www.process.com