Press Release
Contacts:
Richard Countie Dan Weadock
Public Relations Vice President
Boston Communications Fast Engines, Inc.
617-912-1100 617-491-3333
rcountie@bcomm.com weadock@fastserv.com
Fast Engines Unveils Innovative New Development Tools for Fast.Serv Pro
Subscribers to Receive Cutting Edge FastCGI Technology
for No Additional Cost
Cambridge, MA, June 1, 1998 – Fast Engines, Inc., today introduced two new
development tools as enhancements to its award-winning FastCGI web server
plug-in, Fast.Serv Pro. The Authorizer and Control Panel enhancements
significantly improve the ease-of-use for Fast.Serve Pro and will be
offered to all maintenance and support contract subscribers for no
additional cost. Beginning immediately, subscribers to the maintenance
program will receive for free all FastCGI related software products
introduced by Fast Engines during the term of their subscription. This is
in addition to full technical support and updates for Fast.Serv Pro, the
company’s flagship offering.
Semyon Dukach, Fast Engines’ Director of Technology, explains, “Our
intention has always been to deliver exceptional added value to our
customers. This new feature of the maintenance contract is a natural
outgrowth of our corporate philosophy. We have committed ourselves to
providing our customers with timely and effective enhancements to our core
products. Now we will be able to accomplish this for one low annual price,
instead of selling each new development separately.”
The new Authorizer enables developers using Fast.Serv Pro to write their
own customized authorization scripts in FastCGI. This means that instead of
relying upon default Netscape authorization, they can look up users in a
custom database. With the Authorizer enhancement, Fast.Serv Pro now matches
NSAPI feature for feature, at equal or better performance.
The Control Panel enhancement allows developers to interact visually with
all the FastCGI applications running on their server using a web-based
administrative interface. Usage statistics on all FastCGI applications are
dynamically updated and individual applications can be restarted from the
control panel without restarting the web server.
Significantly, Fast.Serv Pro accomplishes all this while avoiding the
drawbacks associated with APIs: their proprietary nature, relative
complexity, language dependence, lack of process isolation, and strong
tie-ins to server architecture. These characteristics effectively prevent
API users from enjoying any benefit whatsoever from their prior-typically
considerable-investments in CGI scripts. In strong contrast, Fast.Serv Pro
maintains the advantages inherent in CGI, while decisively addressing the
inadequate performance that had caused it to fall out of favor for
high-traffic web-sites.
Pricing and Availability
Fast.Serv Pro is now available and can be downloaded via the Web at
http://www.fastserv.com. Price is $2,000 per server, $8,500 for a pack of
five server licenses. The annual Maintenance contract (which includes
Support and Updates) is $600 per server or $2550 per five pack.
About Fast.Serv Pro
Fast.Serv Pro is a server plug-in that enables web servers to execute CGI
applications faster. Based on the open standard FastCGI protocol, Fast.Serv
Pro is available as a Netscape server plug-in on all major Unix platforms,
including Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Irix, Digital Unix as well as Microsoft NT.
Currently, Fast.Serv Pro is being used by high traffic Web servers within
Fortune 500 companies involved in publishing, banking, telecommunications,
and government. Netscape Enterprise 2.01, 3.0, 3.51, and FastTrack servers
are supported. Fast.Serv Pro will also soon be available for Microsoft IIS.
About Fast Engines, Inc.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fast Engines is a leader in
developing and marketing high performance tools for accelerating Web based
applications. Products developed by Fast Engines include Fast.Serv – a
server plug-in that accelerates the execution of CGI applications, and
RadTcl – an enhanced Tcl interpreter for Netscape servers.
For more information see the Fast.Serv homepage at http://www.fastserv.com
