Akamai, Oracle team to personalize Web

by Jennifer Mears

May 4, 2001 —

Content delivery service provider Akamai and software maker Oracle have teamed to create a proposed standard language aimed at making it easier to deliver personalized, dynamic content over the 'Net.

The companies this week will announce Edge Side Includes (ESI), a markup language that can be inserted into applications to identify fragments of Web pages that can then be assembled and updated at the network's edge.

The idea is to more quickly deliver up-to-date content. The companies say they are talking with other vendors in the application server and content delivery industry, but no one has yet committed to joining them in adopting ESI.

Thorsten Ganz, director of product marketing at Akamai, says the companies plan to submit ESI to a standards body by the end of May, but wouldn't say which one. He says ESI specifications will be available on the Oracle and Akamai Web sites in the meantime.

Akamai, whose business is speeding content from its global network of more than 10,000 geographically distributed cache servers, and Oracle, which includes caching technology in its Oracle 9i application server, have been focused on accelerating the delivery of dynamic Web sites, observers say.

"They got together and recognized the interesting value of making the two things work together," says Peter Christy, research director at Jupiter Research. Because ESI is based on HTML-like tags, Christy says he wouldn't be surprised to see Oracle and Akamai be open to modifications and succeed in creating an open standard. "It's an interesting step in allowing more and more processing to operate in shared resources out at the edge of the network," he says.

Neal Goldman, director of Internet computing strategies at The Yankee Group, says ESI will improve the Akamai network and Oracle's 9i application server because it will give both more reach. An enterprise customer could cache its content on the Oracle server, for example, and then distribute it to Akamai's global network without retagging or changing a line of code, he says. The reverse is true for Akamai customers who decide they want to use the Oracle 9i application server Web cache in front of their origin servers.

What Oracle and Akamai need to do, Goldman says, is get tool vendors to create custom tags for ESI. Already, Oracle is providing support for ESI for Java, offering a set of custom JSP tag libraries that can be used to generate ESI code using Java Server Page syntax.

Navarrow Wright, CTO at BET.com, a portal geared for the African-American community, has used Akamai to deliver his site's static content since its launch a little more than a year ago.

Today, BET.com is in the process of implementing Akamai's EdgeSuite, which delivers dynamic content from the edge of the network. The prospect of an open standard is encouraging to Wright.

"Right now, as a new EdgeSuite customer, we have to implement separate sets of tags that communicate with EdgeSuite for it to work," he says. "For example, we run Vignette storage server. If they had come out with a solution that integrated it more tightly with Vignette storage server there wouldn't be major changes we'd have to make. . . . So if there was a standard and all of the major software players adhered to that standard, it would be an easier migration."

ESI will be available iin EdgeSuite and the Oracle 9i application server some time in May.

In the future, Ganz says, Oracle and Akamai plan to incorporate other features into ESI, such as security standards so developers can implement security and access controls around certain page fragments delivered from the network's edge.

Network World