On 9/19/02, Clark Venable said:

>How does Conversant serve enclosures?  Does it load them into it's
>object database, or does it store them on disk and serve them, or
>does it offload the task to a static web server?

Conversant uses "engines" to store enclosures. Different engines handle enclosures in different ways, and custom engines are easily written to do the work however you want.

The default engine (and this is how your server is set up, Clark) stores enclosures on disk, not in the database. Information about the enclosures (mime type, file name, size, etc.) is stored in the database.

When Conversant receives a request for the enclosures, it simply sends the file stored on disk.

Since the enclosures are stored in the file system, it's also possible to have a traditional server like Apache or IIS serve the enclosures. We've never actually done it, but it's certainly possible. The enclosure macro could even be updated to support a "secondary url" for enclosures, so it would point to the static server's url instead of Conversant's.

Lots of options.

Seth

P.S. Incidentally, this is the kind of thing that might be of more interest to the developers.