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O
OL-Lachance
Inspiring
May 8, 2014
Answered

Which server combination is the best?

  • May 8, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 534 views

Initially when we installed the RoboHelp Server (Version 9), we set it up as what seemed to be the easiest and most relevant: IIS7 pointing to the Tomcat application as described in the installation guide. This made sense since the company mostly uses Microsoft products.

However, I've realized that the integration between IIS and tomcat is less than perfect. For instance, I was never able to get "pretty URLs" working, as attempting to do URL Rewrite fails. This is because they're not "the same server", which I do understand. Yesterday I tried messing around with getting custom 404 pages working because I want to get a notification in some form whenever a page is not found (at the moment, this is generally because we're re-writing our software from scratch and the documentation suffers the same fate, so some pages just haven't been written yet). This doesn't seem to work even if I did follow IIS customerror tutorials to the letter.

So what I'm wondering is... is there a better combination? Since Tomcat is maintained by Apache, would it make more sense to use the Apache web server itself? Or maybe not use an external web server at all and only use Tomcat - after all, this server is 100% dedicated to the documentation, there's nothing else on it at all.

My requirements are as such:

- Must continue serving our existing "static" HTML and PDF documentation

- Must support URL Rewrites (we have plenty of them, redirecting users from non-translated documentation towards the english language, rewriting for "global" stylesheets, etc), especially doing pretty URLs for the documentation (rewriting help.mycompany.com/en/software-name/installing-software.html to help.mycompany.com/robohelp/robo/server/en/projects/software-name/Default.html#installing-software.html , without the user seeing the latter in his Address bar)

- Must support custom error handling. I'll admin I don't know JSP anymore than I know ASPX so I'd prefer if I could use PHP for this, but I can read tutorials... as long as they work for this setup.

- Must run on Windows.

Help, please?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer RoboColum_n_

We have always used Apache as our web server with Tomcat and have not come across the problems you describe. This combination has not caused any undue problems for us. What I would suggest is try to get another server that you could install RHS9 on with Apache and Tomcat and publish some of your help to it to test your requirements.

1 reply

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_Correct answer
Legend
May 8, 2014

We have always used Apache as our web server with Tomcat and have not come across the problems you describe. This combination has not caused any undue problems for us. What I would suggest is try to get another server that you could install RHS9 on with Apache and Tomcat and publish some of your help to it to test your requirements.

O
OL-LachanceAuthor
Inspiring
May 8, 2014

Thank you, I'm going to try out using Apache. Thankfully our servers are built on a vSphere virtualization environment so all I need to do is to snapshot the "dev" server and try it out. Then all I need to do is convince IT that this is the way to go...

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