Briefly in the preceding section, Custom ports and port management, you read about the potential for users to access the Oracle BI application by entering a URL into the address bar without a port number. So instead of http://myserver.com:9500/analytics they can use http://myserver.com/analytics. This configuration is achievable by incorporating what is known as a web (HTTP) tier proxy. In most architectures, the web tier that handles all of the HTTP traffic and the application tier that handles all of the dynamic rendering, database connection, and so on, are separated. Although usually this is done by means of separate physical servers, the configuration can be achieved on the same physical server as long as the server is robust enough to handle the added resource needs of the web tier server. The web/HTTP servers that are compatible with Oracle BI 12c are Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), Oracle HTTP Server (OHS, and Apache Web Server. OHS is merely a more robust implementation of the open source Apache Web Server solution. Each of these web tier servers can integrate on a Windows operating system, but only OHS and Apache can be integrated on a Unix/Linux operating system. Another very robust HTTP web server is called NGINX (pronounced Engine-X).

We already discussed how Oracle WebLogic Server is a robust application server and how although it can definitely handle incoming HTTP traffic like a champ it does not have all of the features of a pure HTTP server such as IIS or Apache. One of the nicest features about a web server is that it can compress and cache both static files and dynamic requests from the application server in order to speed up response times when a user requests information from the server. For Oracle BI, this means that a user's dashboards will render faster in their browser as well as any queries they may submit.

Not all client web browsers are created equally. Specifically Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) versions 7 and 8 have a hiccup that causes pages to render slower on them when benchmarked against other web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. This issue potentially affects your Oracle BI implementation, especially if an organization uses MSIE as the corporate web browser standard. There are also other organizations that have seen where a version of their web browser client standard is not directly supported by Oracle BI, instead of trying to force users into configurations such as IE's Enterprise Mode, there is a more global, safer solution. One can fix these browser compatibility issues by putting a web tier in front of our application tier. It will not only increase the speed of Oracle BI in Internet Explorer, but other browsers and consumption devices such as mobile tablets as well. Because we are using a Microsoft Windows Server in this book as our core operating system for the exercise, you will learn how to set up this web tier compression configuration using NGINX.