HP unveils free secure server at SIGWeb

Some e3000 sites to get bundled product next year

By Steve Hammond

HP World Special Interest Group meetings are not known to be suspenseful gatherings, but the 2001 SIGWeb meeting had some cliff-hanging moments.

After handling the group housekeeping, re-electing Mike Gueterman and Rich Trapp as the SIG co-chairs, Gueterman called on HP’s Mark Bixby to update the gathered members on the Internet and interoperability developments made by HP’s CSY R&D lab in the past year.

Bixby waited until his next-to-last slide, but when he announced that WebWise Secure Web server is becoming a free product within the next year, soft cheers and a smattering of applause came up from the group, breaking the anticipation. The secure server will be included in the e3000’s Fundamental Operating System (FOS) MPE/iX 7.5, and it will be based on the latest Internet version of the Apache Web server.

The software will supersede the existing FOS version of Apache. “I expect it to be in the next mainline release of MPE/iX,” said Bixby. “We are looking at mid-2002.”

This version has been anticipated by the Web-centric users because of its heightened security capabilities. It will include SSL encryption and be in a suite with Apache. Bixby also noted that a demo of the secure server might be available as a downloadable patch from HP’s Jazz server.

In the meantime, version 1.3.14 of Apache/iX, a server without the security features, is now included in the latest MPE/iX 7.0 Express 1 release. This bundled version has DSO capability, to permit the easy addition of new functionality modules, uses mod_proxy, mod_rewrite and mod_vhost_alias, and has a new installation scheme, plus many apache.org bug fixes.

Other anticipated Web-related enhancements in the coming year include a new version of Samba (2.0.10) with encrypted passwords, PHP freeware, and sendmail being supported in FOS.

Although not new, Bixby reminded the SIG about the invent3k public access machine. It is a fully-loaded e3000 989-400 on the internet, set up to allow developers a high-end platform for developing and testing software. Anyone interested in using this resource needs to register at jazz.external.hp.com/pads.

HP 3000 vendors supplied some of the meeting content, with Bob Deskin, Cognos’ PowerHouse Web Product Manager giving a demo of the latest version of PowerHouse Web. It is version 2.49c, which will be going into beta testing in the next few months. This version will include dynamic list generation and one-to-many relationships for the first time.

See’s Candies’ Greg Gibbons followed with a short presentation of See’s e-commerce Web application. The company has always done a large volume of mail order sales, so they chose to incorporate Web sales into their home-grown mail order operation running on their e3000.

Gibbons evaluated different development suites and chose Cold Fusion running on an application server. Cold Fusion would then use Omnidex’s ODBC to connect to the e3000 using COBOL subroutines there for tasks such as generation of unique order numbers and calculation of various shipping options. Last year, See’s processed 180,000 orders.

The final presentation came from Terry O’Brien of DISC. They are distributing as a freeware package ODXSQL, which allows access to TurboIMAGE via SQL without Allbase. DISC did not feel this to be a commercially viable product, so they chose to make it freeware. “It lets you play with Java access to Turbo,” said O’Brien.

ODXSQL is available via download at www.DISC.com/odxshare. DISC will offer no phone support for the free product, only support via e-mail. Users must register with DISC (at the Web site) to receive support.