the remainder of the system was unaffected, just as the World Wide Web is unaffected when a Web site fails. This allowed Plumtree to develop a reliable system that incorporated services from across the enterprise. The parallel engine Plumtree's HTTP-based architecture created serious performance challenges, as each portal page now depended on components running on other platforms. Previously, no other system had used Internet protocols to distribute one system's processing to many components. Application server libraries for opening HTTP connections were unacceptably slow, and unable to handle the number of connections that a large portal deployment would require. In 2000, Plumtree created a new layer of software infrastructure known as the parallel engine, designed for high-speed, large-scale communications via Internet protocols. The result: in third-party tests, the portal maintained a high level of performance even as the number of services it integrated increased; increasing the number of services integrated by an order of magnitude decreased performance by only a tenth of a second. UNIX support Plumtree's Web Services Architecture allowed portal services to be developed in any language, and hosted on any platform, but the portal itself ran only on Windows. As Plumtree's business matured, it became necessary to support more platforms. In 2001, Plumtree released the first version of its portal software designed to run on UNIX operating systems, with a Java programming interface and a Java user interface. Because of its Web Services Architecture, all the services developed for the Windows portal could also connect via HTTP to the UNIX portal. Plumtree's stated goal at the time was to become the only provider of Web technology with Microsoft- and Java-oriented solutions. Web services standards In 2002, Plumtree extended the Web Services Architecture of its Windows and UNIX products, to support remote components for indexing content from different repositories, federating searches to different search engines, authenticating users against different directories and profiling users’ interests and preferences from different systems, all with the same level of radical openness to application servers and programming languages. To ensure that these components could share information about the user and his portal context, the portal later featured its own Web services programming interface. Developer support Having redesigned its system to rely on Web services for integrating content, search, users and user attributes, Plumtree in 2002 was one of the first vendors to recognize the practical difficulties of ensuring that Web services developed in different