Sun Microsystems is the #1 server manufacturer in the world. The reason? Reliability, dependability and scalability. All MMA accounts are hosted Sun Sparc machines with the Solaris operating system.

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) helps separate content from appearance, making it easier to update design and data independtly. The result can be a time-savings when it comes to maintaining large, data-intensive sites.

The #1 web server worldwide

Java servlets are the perfect way to replace CGI scripts with faster, more efficient, multithreaded operations. That's why MMA supports servlets on every account we host. Servlets are server-side programs that can perform many of the same tasks as CGI scripts, but also include a number of capabilities that make them easy to adapt for more sophisticated uses.

Java Server Pages are HTML pages with Java code embedded in them. The Java code is compiled and displayed on-the-fly when the page is viewed from the web. This makes it easy for those familiar with Java to include dynamic content in their HTML pages.

The Java Advantage

Unlike Perl and other CGI languages which spawn a new server process for each user request, servlets use a dynamic pool of threads running under a single Java Virtual Machine process.

The result is that servlets can handle many times more users than the same application written with Perl scripts without impacting overall server performance. And, as your site grows in popularity, the same servlets can be scaled to take advantage of multiple processors and higher level database applications, while a site based on Perl scripts will eventually need to be completely replaced with a more scalable solution.

Because servlets are such a great technology, all MMA hosting accounts include the ability to run servlets. We also include a Java Server Pages implementation that lets you include beans and other dynamic content in your pages. To help you get started, we also include a few example servlets you can use and learn from.

For more information about servlets and Java Server Pages, we recommend the books Java Servlets and JSP (Murach, 2003), Java Servlet Programming (O'Reilly, 1999) and Professional Java Server Programming (Wrox, 1999).