Proxy awareness

When integrating HTML emitting content providers behind a reverse proxy, the term proxy-aware is very important. A proxy-aware content provider is one that emits (HTML) content containing links that either point to the reverse proxy or are not fully qualified URLs (see glossary above).

A content provider using proxy-unaware links, is not working properly because the link points to a host that is not visible in front of the reverse proxy or the resource is not mapped on the reverse proxy's URL namespace. nevisProxy supports automatic content rewriting to correct these problems, but content rewriting costs performance (CPU) and may, under certain circumstances, not work correctly (e.g., when using JavaScript to construct dynamic URLs).

The proxy awareness therefore needs to be checked by testing the application through the reverse proxy or check the HTML content for fully qualified URLs and (in case the content providers namespace is mapped into a sublocation on the reverse proxy) absolute URLs.

J2EE based servlet applications are usually proxy aware or may be easily made proxy aware by changing the deployment URL. The servlet application is fully proxy aware, when the HTML content does not change, when selecting an alternate deployment URL.