posted 15 years ago
The listing of advantages and disadvantages sounds a bit confused to me, but it seems that the author put the emphasis on how to administer such a solution, and how to use it in clusters. That's understandable given that he works for a company that sells a server for which such topics need to be addressed, but it means that your requirements -and thus the best solution- might be different.
More important than the question what the best architecture for such a server might be, though, is the question of its usefulness, IMO. That is to say, what advantage has a servlet-based approach to independent HTTP and FTP servers? FTP (which has relatively long-running sessions) is a different beast than HTTP (where requests come in short bursts, and the connection is not maintained in between, HTTP keepalive notwithstanding). What would an FTP servlet do - execute particular code if a certain file or directory is uploaded or downloaded? Create files on the fly? I think answering these questions is at least as important as clustering and administration when it comes to determining the architecture.
