The ability to generate dynamic web pages is a
critical technology for the success of E-commerce. We
survey several commercial server-side dynamic web page
technologies (CGI, ASP, Servlet and JSP) and provide a
comparison on the performance of these technologies.
CGI written in Perl-like scripting language, Servlet
and JSP are platform independent and they can run on
most of the web servers. Both JSP and ASP are able to
separate code from layout, which makes it easier for
page designer to deploy. Java APIs make it possible
for
Servlets to handle complex enterprise applications.
In addition, Servlets are called within the server
context, so they have all the security of the server
itself.
HTTP is a stateless protocol, and there are many ways
for a web application to identify the requesting
client, such as using cookie, hidden form field, or
URL rewriting. In addition, ASP, Servlet and JSP
have a built-in Session object to help maintain the
server-state. Storing opened database connection
object in the session improves the web server
performance. CGI/Perl does not provide buffering, but
ASP, Servlet and JSP do. Our experiments indicated
that Servlet provides the best performance
followed by ASP, JSP and CGI. Accessing a database in
SQL Server, ASP performs well using ADO, whereas
Servlet performs as well using a direct JDBC driver
instead of a JDBC-ODBC bridge.