MWSF: WebSTAR for OS X to be previewed

4D Inc. is previewing WebSTAR Server Suite V for Mac OS X at this week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

Tentatively due this spring, the product will be far faster than WebSTAR 4 running on Mac OS 9 because it will take full advantage of the new BSD socket network API and preemptive threading, resulting in a tremendous speed boost, according to Brendan Coveney, president of 4D. And since Mac OS X will be much more stable than Mac OS 9, a crashing CGI will not result in a crashed server. 4D WebSTAR V will also have new features, he added.

“Producing solid tools for the Macintosh community is vital to our business,” said Coveney. “We are committed to doing everything we can to provide a solid stable release that combines the benefits of WebSTAR with the power of Mac OS X.”

4D WebSTAR V is a Carbon application. Its new Administration interface will be very similar to the old one, but will offer some new features. Although the underlying architecture has changed dramatically from WebSTAR 4, Coveney said 4D will keep most of the screens much the same as you remember them.

Old plug-ins won’t work. Developers will need to port their plug-ins to the Carbon application programming interfaces, and then recompile them as Mach-O binaries.

WebSTAR V will make full use of multiple processors. However, the amount of benefit you receive from additional processors will depend on the kind of data being served. Dynamic data requests, such as SSI pages, are CPU-bound instead of I/O-bound and therefore will usually receive the most benefit from the extra processors, according to 4D.

Version 4.x will run in the Classic environment of OS X. However, there are no plans to back-port 4D WebSTAR V to Mac OS 9.