Bob Teichman, from IBM's Washington Systems Center, came to talk about the OS/390 resident web server.

First of all, about its name: don't be put off by "Domino GO". The web server has nothing to do with Domino, the Lotus product. This is marketing hype, kind of like how IBM renamed all their language products "AD/Cycle Something-Or-Other" a few years ago. This web server is an enhanced version of the old ICSS ("Internet Connection Secure Server") product of the last few years.

Many people confused ICSS with the old Internet BonusPak, but they were in error. ICSS was always delivered with OS/390, but BonusPak was separately ordered. BonusPak contained sample web pages to help get you started, documentation and other stuff. In an all-too-typical display of the modern mercenary IBM, the BonusPak has been cancelled. You cannot get it anymore. So if you have one (and we do), guard it well. The samples still work, the documentation is still good, and there is no substitute product.

The new Domino GO product supports SSL (the "Secure Sockets Layer"), and is based on the original CERN server. In fact, its logs are standard CERN logs. It serves both MVS and HFS files. It supports a wide variety of CGI opportunities (i.e. you can run arbitrary programs in response to a web browser query), and even allows you to run COBOL CGI programs (with a helper program written in C).

It implements a "GWAPI" - GO Webserver API - so that you can run certain CGI programs as a DLL in the web server address space. This bypasses the considerable overhead involved in dispatching a standard CGI program.

The Domino GO web server runs as UID 0. In the Unix world, this means that the web server is a superuser, with access to the entire file system. The web server dynamically changes itself to user state when a file system access is initiated, and it makes heavy use of RACF.

The web server supports multihomed sites (more than one IP address), and you can configure different home pages by IP address.

We will probably want to implement this one of these days, perhaps for the ISPF web client, but almost certainly for the 3270 Host On Demand product, which provides a secure 3270 session via a web browser.