At the Biodiversity Heritage Library, we have replaced a proprietary jpeg2000 image server, that was straining under the load, with a new, open source jpeg2000 server, djatoka. Chris Freeland and Chris Moyers cover the background in far more detail on the BHL Blog, so here I’ll cover my rationale and decisions I made to provide a scalable, stable infrastructure to provide the images as efficiently as possible.
When I started sketching out how I wanted to run djatoka, I knew I wanted it to provide security, caching for performance and scalability and fault tolerance. Our server runs Tomcat, which I didn’t want to be public facing. Because of this I proxy Tomcat requests through Apache with the use of ajp_proxy, the successor to the old mod_jk. Initially I was using nginx in place of Apache, but after reading about all the functionality and performance improvements ajp_proxy offered, it was a no brainier; this is how to present Tomcat in a production environment.
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Day one, Obama calls for open government
Obama, keeping it real, as promised!
UPDATE: the memo is already posted on the whitehouse.gov site for anyone to review! How refreshing!
During this, his first day in office, President Obama called for open government, and issued a memorandum which spells out to approach the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) “with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails.” This presumption of openness is in direct contrast with limits the Bush administration put in place, a fact driven home by the last line of the memo:
Sec. 6. Revocation. Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked..
Now we’re talking! More of the memo reads:
But wait, there’s more…