Figure 15 shows a the second phase of evolution for a commercial Web site designed to provide efficient catalog browsing and fast, secure shopping carts for potential customers. All customer requests are routed to the appropriate branch of the network by a Dispatcher that separates requests based on Internet protocol. HTTP requests go to the static Web site; HTTPS requests go to the shopping network. The primary, static Web site is still served by a cluster of proxy servers with active caches that acts as a surrogate for the Web servers. This part of the network mirrors the network in the first phase.
The electronic commerce portion of the Web site is also served by a cluster of proxy servers. However, the Caching Proxy nodes are enhanced with several plug-in modules. The SSL handshaking is offloaded to a cryptographic hardware card, and authentication is performed through the Access Manager (formerly Policy Director) plug-in. A Dynamic Caching plug-in reduces the workload on the WebSphere® Application Server by storing common data. A plug-in on the application server invalidates objects in the Dynacache when necessary.
All shopping cart applications are tied into the customer database that was used to authenticate the user. This prevents the user from having to enter personal information into the system twice, once for authentication and once for shopping.
This network divides traffic according to client usage, removing the processor-intensive SSL authentication and electronic commerce shopping carts from the primary Web site. This dual-track Web site allows the network administrator to tune the various servers to provide excellent performance based on the role of the server within the network.