1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to utilizing a Static Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to access the control of a plenty of scattered inner web servers, and more particularly, to a method, apparatus and computer program product arranged for managing the static URL access.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Utilizing a static URL to perform the web page access is convenient for users. Further, in typical conditions, static URLs are more likely to appear in the search result of a search engine. This helps to raise visibility of web pages. Hence, how to provide the service of a set of web pages having non-static URLs to users through static URLs is an important issue, wherein the number of this set of web pages might be large, e.g., tens of thousands of web pages.
Some schemes are provided in related arts. According to a conventional scheme, a set of reverse tunnels may be created for each of web servers in advance, and each of virtual hosts is assigned to a corresponding reverse tunnel. In this way, no matter where a user is located, the user can access any of the web servers located behind the firewall through reverse proxy servers. Hence, the existence of the firewall does not block the users from accessing these web servers. However, some problems, such as some side effects, are generated. For example, even when the user and these web servers are located in the same intranet, the user still has to access through these reverse proxy servers, which slows the access speed and increases loads of these reverse proxy servers. For another example, since these reverse tunnels have to be ready in advance for the user to use at any time, when there are too many idle servers among the reverse proxy servers, there would be much consumption of the system resources.
According to another conventional scheme, the user may directly obtain information of a set of reverse tunnels from a system which records server information, and directly use the set of reverse tunnels to access a corresponding set of web pages. However, some problems, such as some side effects, are generated. For example, the health condition of the reverse tunnels cannot be detected. More particularly, when some reverse tunnels become invalid, the architecture implemented based on this conventional scheme cannot adopt corresponding measures to fix the problem, which reduces the smoothness of the user experience. For another example, when the set of reverse tunnels are not constructed using the standard port 80 or port 443, the user may be unable to access the set of web pages due to the access restriction enforced by the firewall.
It can be seen from the above that the conventional schemes cannot provide stable static URL access service to users without generating side effects. Hence, there is a need for a novel method capable of improving performance of a web page access management apparatus.