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Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:39:49 -0500
From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
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Subject: Re: Ban the phrase "reverse-proxy"?
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>>> What would folks say to renaming all occurances of "reverse proxy"
>>> to say "gateway" in our documentation?

jean-frederic clere wrote:
> I am not sure that is a good idea see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy

read and contrast to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_%28telecommunications%29
which is equivalent to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_%28computer_networking%29

Erik Abele wrote:
> On 01.08.2007, at 13:50, Lars Eilebrecht wrote:
>
>> "Reverse Proxy" is a commonly used term, and I don't see a reason
>> why we should use something else.
> 
> and is there a special reason for the proposed change or just
> über-correctness? :)

several reasons;

* Reverse-proxy is somethign of a double negative, making the term
  impossible to 'visualize' - Even "Content-proxy" would be clearer
  than 'Reverse'.  We aren't sending requests from the back end server
  to the client, that would be "reversing" the connection or proxy.

* it doesn't conform to proxy semantics from an HTTP server point
   of view.

RFC spelled out for a very long time that

proxy
      [...]
      A "transparent proxy" is a proxy that does not modify the request
      or response beyond what is required for proxy authentication and
      identification. A "non-transparent proxy" is a proxy that modifies
      the request or response in order to provide some added service to
      the user agent, such as group annotation services, media type
      transformation, protocol reduction, or anonymity filtering.

gateway
      A server which acts as an intermediary for some other server.
      Unlike a proxy, a gateway receives requests as if it were the
      origin server for the requested resource; the requesting client
      may not be aware that it is communicating with a gateway.

* the httpd developers freely admit the way things are named is often
  crusty and could use improvement.

At the minimum, I plan to notate "reverse-proxy (e.g. gateway server)"
liberally throughout the explanation pages of the module and guides.

Bill

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