Prashant Deva's blog

The placid website is divided into 2 modules – asp.net and java. For those who are wondering why we have such a toxic mix of languages, well its cause our ANTLR Studio license generator program is written in Java. We tried porting it to .net but due to some weird incompatibilities in the cryptography apis we found it much easier to just run it as a separate module in java.

So we had iis running on port 80 and tomcat on port 8080. I know there is an apache_jk connector available which allows running both iis and tomcat on port 80, but I just couldn't get it to work for the life of me. So we were stuck with critical portions of the site running on port 8080, like the page to download the evaluation license.

The reason why port 8080 of course caused a lot of problems since most corporate firewalls have that port blocked as it is not one of the ports used by any standard app like http, ftp, ssh, etc. This resulted in many people not being able to download the evaluation license.

But as of today, that has changed and now the java module is running on port 443. Port 443 is the port used by 'secure http' or 'https' and thus is open on every corporate firewall, thus you should no longer face any problems accessing any portion of the site anymore :)