Resin FAQ

How does Resin differ from other application servers?

The Resin architecture is a combination of web components focused around the Java EE Web Profile used to run data-intensive, massively scalable and rich web applications. Whereas other application servers focus only on one component in the architectural stack leaving you to plug together different 3^rd party pieces, Resin unifies your architecture and configuration. Resin contains the world’s fastest web-server, Java EE application server, proxy cache and development platform.

Resin has been designed in-house from the ground up with thread optimizations in the C language to optimize hardware resources.

What is the difference between Resin and Resin Pro?

We provide Resin in two flavors because there is a need for both in the marketplace. If your web application is simply a subset of the Java enterprise application components (namely: war files, Java Servlets, JSF, JSP, and Java Database Connectivity) and will not serve a great number of concurrent users, Resin will deliver performance, reliability, operational predictability, and ease of use. Resin does this as the best of breed with performance improvements over other competing open source solutions (Tomcat, Apache Web Server, NginX, Jboss Wildfly).

Resin Pro is geared towards businesses, governments, and enterprises that require the highest level of scalability and functionality:

• Companies that want a clear advantage in their development and deployment
• Businesses whose website or web application has a direct impact on their bottom line
• Governments who need to the ability to scale a web application to provide real time data
• Hospitals sharing massive amounts of data to better diagnose patients
• Entrepreneurs who are ready to assault a new industry with an application or idea that will potentially scale to massive users.

These are the areas where the aforementioned Open Source components are not well suited and where we have engineered Resin Pro to include:

• Dynamic Clustering – We replaced locking with non-locking atomic operations, cleared contention bottlenecks, improved the async/epoll performance, and reduced thread overhead to handle 100,000 requests per second
• Cloud Support – Elastic cluster members can be rapidly added or removed using a single command. Cluster topology, load balancing, caching, messaging and management automatically adapt to dynamic servers
• Compiled PHP on the JVM – Improves performance, scalability and security of PHP applications by allowing PHP code to directly call Java Objects
• Security though Open SSL integration – A comprehensive security framework for application authentication, authorization and transport level SSL based security to keep your data secure
• Smart Software Load balancer – Application load is shared among resources automatically, keeping your resources balanced.
• Proxy cache – Faster application performance is possible with Java caching by saving the results of long calculations and reducing database load and application response time

What is Resin’s licensing model?

Resin offers a straightforward licensing model; one license covers all components of the Resin architecture. For pricing, refer to our price list.

Is there support for Resin?

Free community support is available at the Resin Google Groups.

Paid enterprise support and services are available through Caucho Support and Services.

How does Resin’s performance compare to other solutions?

Resin is the fastest web server in the world. In our latest benchmarks, Resin handles 40-150% more load with less errors than Apache httpd server and 20-25% more load with less errors than NginX. Resin is also incredibly small with all components totaling 30MB in size, allowing more memory for your resource intensive applications.

Is Resin embeddable?

Yes! We even have a great tutorial on how to embed Resin in a Rasberry Pi. To the larger extent Resin’s embeddable nature means you can be guaranteed the functionality and benefits of Java in all types of environments. We also have a very large install base with Resin running behind the scenes.

Also, because of our native code optimizations, we managed to package all of these great features into 30MB!

How do I become a reseller?

We’ve built Resin so that it is fast and easy to use. As such, we would love for our dedicated engineering efforts to be able to benefit the community. If you would like to get involved please refer to our reseller page or contact edward@caucho.com directly.

What is “data-intensive” and “enterprise”?

A data-intesive mission critical application requires multiple capabilities and functionalities to serve a high volume of concurrent users. These include but are not limited to:

1. Asynchronous messaging
2. Encyrption and verification
3. Load balancing
4. Transaction and Resource Management
5. Administration
6. Session Reiliability
7. Front end scripting language support
8. Database Pooling
9. Request rewriting
10. Many more!

Keep in mind, while your application is running business imperative data, you will need:

1. New features adding to the complexity of your architecture
2. Updates and upgrades to existing applications
3. Getting support and bug fixes for your underlying components

Your product sounds great, but we’ve already invested so much in other software components we don’t have the time to rip and tear, meeting deadlines are hard enough! What can we do about it?

This is a concern and reality for numerous companies who have deployed on architecture with the promise of more features being added and are now bogged down with tons of legacy code and applications. However, if your application has been coded to standard Java EE API’s then a simple drag and drop of your .war file should allow you to immediately see the benefits of a Resin deployment. Not to mention once your application has been ported to Resin, you will see a much shorter development cycle.

Also, our support comes directly from the same engineers who work on the core code of Resin. No “1-800″ or tiered support nonsense. If you have questions about rearchitecting your application to take advantage of Resin’s core, contact us directly. We also offer services where onsite support is needed.

Quickstart Download. Install. Deploy your .war file in under 5 minutes.

Can you tell me about your future plans?

We will continue to develop and architect Resin for the industry. Millions of sites and applications are still powered by much older versions of Resin because we engineer solutions for the future. The best way to hear about our current plans is to subscribe to our newsletter or contact us directly at sales@caucho.com