Chapter 5   WAI Release Notes


Web Application Interface (WAI) is available in iPlanet Web Server 4.1, but is not guaranteed to be available in future releases. We recommend that you do not develop new WAI applications, instead use servlets.

For more information about using the WAI API, see Writing Web Applications with WAI at:

http://www.iplanet.com/docs/

Before installing the WAI component of your iPlanet Web Server 4.1, you need to install Visibroker 3.3 or higher from Inprise. For information about Visibroker, see:

http://www.inprise.com/visibroker/

After installing Visibroker, install the WAI component of iPlanet Web Server 4.1. After WAI is installed, you then need to enable WAI. Do this by using the WAI Management page in the Programs tab of the Server Manager. (If WAI is not installed, this button does not appear.)

WAI Compatibility Issues

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The main points to be aware of are:

• OSAGENT Registration is Disabled

• Backward Compatibility Issues

• Different Signature for ORB.init

• Other Java Compatibility Issues

OSAGENT Registration is Disabled
OSAGENT is not started by default in iPlanet Web Server 4.1 since the server does not need it. Therefore, WAI applications need to specify a command line option to disable OSAGENT registration. If a WAI application starts without using the command-line option, it tries to register itself with the OSAGENT (which is not running) and fails.

You can always start OSAGENT manually, in which case you do not need to specify the command-line option to disable registration. You can find more information about OSAGENT in the Visigenic documents.

For Java WAI applications, use the following command to disable OSAGENT registration:

-ORBdisableLocator=true

For example:

java -DORBdisableLocator=true WASP

For C++ WAI applications, use:

-ORBagent 0

For example:

WASP.EXE -ORBagent 0

Backward Compatibility Issues
WAI applications built using the previous versions of iPlanet Web Server need to pass a command line command to work correctly.

For Java WAI applications under JDK 1.1, the command is:

-ORBbackCompat=true

For example:

java -DORBdisableLocator=true -ORBbackCompat=true WASP

For C++ WAI applications, the command is:

-ORBbackCompat 1

For example:

WASP.EXE -ORBagent 0 -ORBbackCompat 1

Different Signature for ORB.init
Java WAI applications that use the ORB.init call have to be modified to use the call with a different signature in order to work under Java 2. Replace the call ORB.init with the call ORB.init(String [] args, Properties props).

Other Java Compatibility Issues
Please refer to Visibroker for Java 3.4 release notes for more information on compatibility with Java 2 platform at:

ftp://ftp.visigenic.com/private/vbj/vbj34/vbjrel.html