Helicon Zoo — a repository of web frameworks and applications for Microsoft IIS.

Helicon Zoo is a single integrated solution to run different popular web technologies and applications on Microsoft IIS. For a convenience it comes as an application repository, from which web applications and complete technology stacks can be easily downloaded and installed. Helicon Zoo brings to IIS support for the following web application engines: PHP, Python (including Django and others), Ruby (including Rails, Sinatra, etc.), Java, Perl, Node.js, Railo (ColdFusion) and Erlang. All these different web applications and technologies can be mixed together on the same server and even within same web site. Plus number of high quality, free and ready-to-run web applications can be installed form Helicon Zoo to your server in a matter of few mouse clicks.

Features

• Automatic process management — Helicon Zoo will launch, shutdown, restart and load balance application worker processes automatically depending on current server load and available system resources. Limits can be set for different web application engines individually.
• Isolation — applications are executed in separate processes. Crash or hang of one application will not affect others running. As applications run with restricted IIS accounts, correct user permissions will also protect your system files and shared settings.
• High speed communication using named pipe and local socket transport with FastCGI or HTTP backend protocol. Helicon Zoo was designed to be used in production and can put your server to the limits of it's capacity.
• Application stability control — constantly monitors backend application health and automatically restarts misbehaved or hang processes.
• Memory usage monitor — ability to restart application worker if memory reaches the limit to protect against memory leaks.
• Monitor for file change and hot-restart applications if source files are changed. Useful for development purposes.
• Application warm-up — don’t let your customers wait for a service.
• Deployment scripts — ability to run application deployment tasks during startup. Allows live updates, database migrations, etc.
• Protect backend applications against Slow POST and buffer overflow attacks with Helicon Zoo protected buffers. Also effective to increase application capacity with slow and mobile clients.
• Comet and long-polling HTTP responses support.
• Independent per web site and per application configuration with automatic reloads.

Benefits

• Instant service—Helicon Zoo has features to minimize possible application downtime. Such features as automatic worker processes startup, restart, warm-up, health monitoring, load balancing, live source files change monitoring and on-fly configuration reload minimize need for web server restart.
• Multi-core utilization—Helicon Zoo can automatically increase or decrease number of worker processes to distribute load on multiple cores or free system resources allowing other applications to run when needed.
• One server—any technology stack. All engines from Helicon Zoo have been tested to work together and with other traditional IIS engines on same server allowing mixing technologies within same web site.
• Security—run applications in isolated processes, with limited user credentials. Additional security level to protect backend processes from some DDOS and malicious HTTP requests.
• Simple application deployment—just copy files into web site directory. Ability to do database migrations and required modules configuration before application start using in-application deploy scripts.
• Build a PaaS hosting — Helicon Zoo can be used as integral part of hosting platform, allowing to offer various web aplications and technologies to clients.

Install Helicon Zoo