Soft links over the Web?

Question

Take this scenario. There is a server(say, A) at www.mysite.com .Now, there's a dynamic number of servers A knows about (knows the IP-adresses to).

The problem is, if a user arrives at http://www.mysite.com/B, we need to redirect him to the server that the URI B will map to( assume that there exists a mapping from such URLs to the list of known servers, and that 'B' is valid here). Is there a way of doing this without redirection? (First deployment will be n GAE, so this redirection is not possible). What I want is the browser showing http://www.mysite.com/B, but rendering content as delivered by the server running on B.

I think that this may be possible, as, multiple webservers are indeed used within the same domain today.

Answer 1

Load Balancing and Clustering notes in part:

With a simple LOAD BALANCING scheme, you can split your traffic down by URL or subdirectory, so that (for example) all traffic for /course goes to one server, and all traffic for /horse goes to another, with the front end machine acting simply as a router, forwarding requests via mod_proxy (if it's running Apache httpd) or similar.

Or does this not cover the case you are describing?

Answer 2

You can achieve the desired behaviour by using a forward proxy. It has nothing to do with programming.