Why did Zeus decide to create their own language (TrafficScript), rather than reusing one of the many third party languages available – TCL, Perl, JavaScript, etc? Read more...

It has been quite some time since my first iZXTM^WiZeus article. I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever get around to part 2. However, the massive Zeus 6.0 release has now been launched. This means that those of us in the Zeus Dev Team have a little more breathing room in our schedules – although we're already hard at work designing and implementing features for the next release! That said, I've managed to squeeze in some time to work on this article in which I present an extension to the previous proof-of-concept: we'll parse the data out of the Zeus Traffic Manager MainIndex page and repackage it for the iPhone web browser. (The Zeus Dev Team has reached 55% iPhone penetration, Android is at 9%. That said, a few of us are certainly tempted by some of the upcoming Android handsets.) Read more...

In this series of articles, I’ve discussed what network-side scripting is, and I’ve described how it can be deployed on three leading traffic management systems to solve two simple problems[1][2]. This final article will cover some advanced applications of network-side scripting. Read more...

As a fun experiment and to highlight ZXTM's flexibility in hosting applications I decided to make ZXTM speak with the help of an API provided by an interesting company Twilio. Read more...

WURFL?! Yes, another acronym: Wireless Universal Resource FiLe The WURFL website expands on this: "You can think of the WURFL as a global database of all devices and their capabilities." Such a database is especially useful in the current mobile device landscape where a vast array of HTML/WML/Flash/AJAX features are implemented differently (or not at all.) In essence, WURFL makes it easier for you to improve the web experience you offer people when they are on the move. Read more...

This post is for anyone using Java extensions that make use of libraries that use org.apache.commons.logging (Apache Commons Logging). By default this logging infrastructure will use Log4J if it is available, otherwise it falls back to its own SimpleLog logging implementation. This is all very well, but as neither of these are aware of ZXTM's log levels and logging infrastructure any messages that come out will show up as scary WARN events in the ZXTM Event Log. Read more...

As is well documented here on the KnowlegeHub, we support the use of Java extensions to manipulate traffic. One of the great things about supporting "Java" is that this really means supporting the JVM platform... which, in turn, means we support any language that will run on the JVM and can access the Java libraries. Declan's article on writing extensions in Scala is a recent example exploiting this fact. Read more...

Many businesses today rely on email to communicate with their customers. It’s a useful tool to keep them up-to-date with current news, events, and offers. So it’s more than a little frustrating when a proportion of those messages end up being flagged as spam and never seen by the intended recipient Read more...

There has been a lot of talk over the past few years about new and different languages targeting the JVM as their runtime platform. Scala has been one of the most high-profile languages in the JVM vanguard. Most notably, in the past year Twitter has announced that it is migrating away from Ruby on Rails to Scala because of RoR's lack of scalability. Read more...

The ZXTM Plugin for Eclipse allows a developer to create, manage and deploy TrafficScript rules using the Eclipse IDE. Read more...

Zeus is willing to provide development licenses at no cost to anyone wishing to build applications that can use Zeus Traffic Manager's load balancing and traffic management capabilities. Read more...

Content protection is a key concern for many online services, and watermarking downloaded documents with a unique ID is one way to discourage and track unauthorized sharing. This article describes how to use ZXTM to uniquely watermark every PDF document served from a web site with the details of each client. Read more...

One of ZXTM's most powerful features is the ability to run Java on your traffic manager, allowing you to use a wide variety of existing libraries. For example, using Java's XML APIs, you can manipulate data on the fly more intelligently than with TrafficScript alone. As a simple demonstration, this article includes a code walkthrough to fetch RSS feeds from several locations and produce one merged, sorted feed, which is more convenient to subscribe to and can be manipulated in other ways at the same time. Read more...

ZXTM 5.1 brings a new 'Event Handling' capability that allows the administrator to configure precisely what actions ZXTM should take when particular events occur. This article gives an overview of this new feature. Read more...

ZXTM's Java Extensions are useful for managing application traffic, but you can also use the GenericServlet interface to write new TrafficScript functions using a Java Extension. Read more...

ZXTM 5.0 allows you to call a customized version of Java's Servlet API from within TrafficScript™. In this article we'll show how you can dynamically change ZXTM's configuration by accessing the SOAP interface of the admin server from a Java Extension that is run when a TrafficScript rule detects a network attack. Read more...

This article combines two ZXTM technologies – Java Extensions and the Control API – and shows you how to query the status of ZXTM with a simple, authenticated web request to generate an immediate status report. Read more...

ZXTM’s Control API is a SOAP-based API that is published as a collection of WSDL files.

If you want to access ZXTM’s Control API from Java (for example, in a Java Extension), you will need to create an interface library. This interface library will expose a collection of Java classes and methods that correspond to the methods and structures in the WSDL specification. Read more...

How can you respond immediately to sudden increases in load, even at night, and still sleep soundly in your bed? Automated Dynamic Provisioning of course!

The popularity of Virtual Infrastructures seems to be increasing on a daily basis, and besides the obvious savings in power, cooling, and hardware, a major benefit of the Virtual data center is increased manageability, and dynamic provisioning. Regardless of whether you think of ZXTM as an Application Delivery Controller, or an Application Traffic Manager, its position in the network means that it is perfectly placed to help you take control of your virtual environment. Read more...

This code snippet describes how to prompt for HTTP Basic Authentication using a Java Servlet. Read more...

This code snippet illustrates how to send a response to an HTTP request from a Java Extension. Read more...

For brevity and clarity, many of our code samples contain code snippets for Java Extensions rather than entire Java Extension classes. Read more...

This ever-so-slightly frivolous Java Extension processes web pages dynamically, reordering and replacing text to give the effect of turning the web upside down. Java Extensions are very powerful application delivery tools, but I'm not sure that this is the most productive way to use them... Read more...

ZXTM 5.0 allows you to inspect and manipulate both incoming and outgoing traffic with a customized version of Java's Servlet API. In this article we'll delve more deeply into some of the semantics of ZXTM's Java Extensions and show how to validate XML files in up- and in downloads using TrafficScript™ and Java Extensions. Read more...

With a Java Extension, you can log traffic events in real time to an external database. The example in this article describes how to log the ‘referring’ source that each visitor comes in from when they enter a website, so that you can determine which sites are sending you the most traffic. Logging is done to a MySQL database.

The article then presents a modification that illustrates how to lazily perform operations such as database writes in the background (i.e. asynchronously) so that the performance the end user observes is not impaired. Read more...

A very common requirement for intranet and extranet applications is the need to authenticate users against an Active Directory (or LDAP) database. The Java Extension in this article describes how to do exactly that. Read more...

This article gives a good introduction to ZXTM 5.0's Java™ Extensions. It describes how to create and deploy a Java Extension that applies a visible watermark to all of the images served from your load-balanced web site. Read more...

ZXTM 5.0 introduces Java™ Extensions, a powerful new way to build and deploy traffic management logic. Java™ Extensions let an application administrator create very sophisticated rules and deploy them in a single location, at the entry point to the application infrastructure. Read more...

ZXTM 5.0 is a major new release of the ZXTM product family. It heralds a number of new features for users of both ZXTM and ZXTM LB, whether using software, virtual appliances or hardware appliances. Read more...

ZXTM 5.0 was released on 20^th May 2008 via customers' download pages and is available for download and evaluation.

ZXTM 5.0 is a major new revision to the ZXTM product family. It has a number of significant new features, including Java Extensions for sophisticated traffic management rules, IPv6 support and support for SIP and RTSP. Read more...

Here are a number of worked examples to familiarize yourself with Zeus Traffic Manager. The previous article in this series - Installing and running the Zeus Desktop Edition - explains how to download, install and run the Zeus Desktop Edition. Read more...

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) came about from a need to improve the performance and reliability of traditional web applications, but they have moved on significantly from simple hardware devices that load-balance TCP connections. Read more...