The open source AOLserver Web server project released a new update this week, enhancing
the server that powers some of the most trafficked sites on the Internet today, including AOL.com.
Licensed under the Mozilla Public License, AOLserver is, according to its project page, a massively scalable
and extensible Web server tuned for large scale, dynamic Web sites.”
The AOLserver includes a dynamic page-scripting language, as well as complete database
integration. The new release adds one API change and a pair of feature enhancements,
including on-the-fly gzip
While Apache’s Web Server has long dominated the Web server space, AOLserver
does have its own advantages.
“AOLserver is multi-threaded and has been since 1995, compared to Apache 2, which
only recently introduced multi-threading into its design,” Dossy Shiobara, AOLserver
project leader, told internetnews.com. “AOLserver tightly integrates the Tcl
programming language as the primary vehicle for implementing server-side functionality.”
According to Shiobara, the Tcl
of advantages. He explained that Tcl has “incredibly simple” syntax that makes it
easy to learn. He also noted that it is relatively fast in comparison to other
scripting languages.
“Tcl is one of the only [scripting] programming languages, which was intended to
be embedded inside a larger application, unlike Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.,” Shiobara
commented. “For the most part, the entire Tcl core is thread-safe — again, intended
to be embedded, and embedded within multi-threaded applications.”
The short-term goal of the AOLserver project is not necessarily to
become a “major” Web server player and take share from Apache or Microsoft’s IIS.
“In the endgame, that may eventually be the goal. However, we definitely see
ourselves as a niche player,” Shiobara said. “AOLserver’s design and philosophy is
all about solving specific problems, and solving them well. Specifically, Web server
software, which is easy to scale, scales well both horizontally and vertically, and
can eventually be scaled to serve the incredible volume of traffic that companies
like AOL need to handle.”
In Shiobara’s view, the server should be considered by heavily trafficked sites —
the 5 percent of Web sites that serve 90 percent of total daily page views on the
Internet.
AOLserver version 3.0 was released as open source software back in late 1999. Since
then, community activity has been increasing slowly according to Shiobara.
“I’ll say that the open source development model is very important, but yes,
the project has always been primarily driven by AOL employees,” Shiobara said.
“I’m always thinking of ways to try and encourage more community involvement in
the project, but it’s not easy.”
In fact growing the community in 2005 is one of Shiobara’s goals for the project.
“For the project itself, I want to try and grow the community in 2005, get
even more people actively involved in it and see if it makes sense for us to
participate in larger activities — OSCON 2005, etc. — to bring AOLserver to a larger
audience, and so on,” he said.
AOLserver 4.0.10 is available for download
from the project’s SourceForge.net page.
