Webware vs. CGI

Advantages of Webware:

• Considerably faster than CGI, because: * The interpreter is not started for each request * Servlet instances are cached * In general, a persistant application leaves more room for caching any sort of result * Resource access can be pooled, for instance, database connections
• Easier programming model: * Threading provides a simpler way of handling concurrent modification of resources (often CGI scripts simply ignore potential race conditions, leading to errors under high load) * Considerable amount of basic code is readily available in Webware: session support, cookie handling, etc.

Disadvantages:

• Not possible to run on many shared commercial hosts, or generally in an environment that doesn't allow long-running processes
• Setup can be more complicated
• Because processes are not recreated for each request, errors or memory leaks might effect other requests