ExCom versus HTML Page

If you are mostly familiar with server side php the you know that it does not “run” continuously – it is not a server in that sense. ExCom only makes sense when a continuously running server is being used. However, a Java server-side app does run continuously and just listens for the browser requests. This is one example of a Java server application.

A server-side Java application may start once and run for weeks, or months. It may be necessary to interact with it from a sysadmin perspective, like tell it to shutdown. You would then use putty to SSH to the machine, or log in directly to the server machine, and execute ExCom with the –kill command. That would poke a command into the running server (a poison pill in this case )

You could have written a web-page to inject the poison pill as well, but that would expose this ability to the internet and require some type of security to control its use. And it requires the internet to interact with the app. A sysadmin needs to be able to interact with the application from the command-line right on the server.