Introduction

This article talks about best practices for use of external proxies vs using rewriter rules in the Enhanced HTTP server.

Details

Whether to use external proxies versus using rewriter rules in the Enhanced HTTP application server is an application design tradeoff not dissimilar to using a single HTTP application server and a XQuery rewriter or endpoint that can dynamically dispatch to different databases and modules (using eval-in).  The Enhanced HTTP server does this type of dispatching much more efficiently, but the concept is similar, with the same pros and cons.

It is mostly an application and business management issue—by sharing the same port you share the same server configuration (authentication, server settings) and the "outside world" only sees one port, so configuring port-based security on firewalls, routers, or load balancers is more difficult.