On Sat, 11 Sep 1999, Joe Touch wrote:
> Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> >
> > Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> >
> > > The most important aspect for a reverse proxy is "on behalf", which
> > > implies that is is set up by and under the administrative control of the
> > > content provider.
> >
> > Sorry, I was a bit uncareful in the wording there. The administrative
> > control is usually that of the network managers of the origin server,
> > which does not neccesary imply that it is under the control of the
> > content provider. It should however be included in the a service
> > agreement between the content provider and management of the origin
> > server, network connection or reverse proxy.
>
> Whether a term is in wide use or not does not necessarily
> require its use in the core of the taxonomy document.
>
> We can easily define an appropriate term and define 'reverse proxy'
> in terms thereof.
>
> What concerns me about the above is the use of "intent"
> in a definition. There must be some objective metric.
> Management control, service agreeements, etc. aren't
> useful objective metrics.
>
> Is there any definition of a reverse proxy that is objective?
> (and can distinguish it completely from a non-reverse proxy cache?)
How about this:
A reverse proxy (usually in the form of an httpd accelerator) handles
requests for lots of users but for only (relatively) few objects.
This is in comparison to a forward proxy which handles requests for
relatively few users but lots of objects.
In any case, the terms ('forward proxy' and 'reverse proxy') identify the
ends of a spectrum of possible implementations and the line between them is
quite blurred.
Brian D. Davison Laboratory for Computer Science Research
davison@acm.org Rutgers, The State Univ. of New Jersey
davison@cs.rutgers.edu http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~davison/
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