The Asynchronous HTTP Server provides high-scalability support for ICEfaces applications that utilize Ajax Push and must be deployed to high volumes of concurrent users. Server-initiated rendering depends on a virtual-connection model that can require additional server-side resources to maintain, particularly threads and sockets. When using application servers without the Asynchronous HTTP Server the concurrent-user scalability of the application is highly dependent on the number of sockets and threads that the specific server configuration can support effectively. The Asynchronous HTTP Server supplements the application-server to remove the thread/socket resource dependencies and provide a virtual-connection implementation that is scalable to very high numbers of concurrent users.

With the ICEfaces 1.6 release, the Enterprise Production Suite (EPS) was repartitioned and made available under open source in two parts:

• The Enhanced Ajax Bridge features previously associated with the EPS product have now been absorbed into the standard Ajax Bridge shipped as part of ICEfaces.
• The Asynchronous HTTP Server offloads traffic from the application server taking over thread and memory management issues. The Asynchronous HTTP Server project is available fordownload here .

For more information, please review the Asynchronous HTTP Server Deployment Guide included in the project download bundle.