Announcing version 1.0 of the perl HTTPD server

Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Message-id: <9305050242.AA10107@austin.BSDI.COM>
To: www-announce@nxoc01.cern.ch, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Announcing version 1.0 of the perl HTTPD server
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Tue, 04 May 1993 21:40:08 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>

Here is the server documentation:
    http://www.bsdi.com/server/httpd.html
Here is where the code lives:
    http://www.bsdi.com/server/
See this for the latest information:
    http://www.bsdi.com/server/overview.html

The whole server is only 50K of perl source.  The base server is only
410 lines (13K, that includes the directory browser).  The rest of the
bulk is 13K of documentation and 22K for the various gateways (1441 lines
total).

This server is based on the perl server developed at cs.indiana.edu
by Marc VanHeyningen.  See:
    http://cs.indiana.edu/perl-server/intro.html
    http://cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html
I did some work to make the base code more portable and then I've
been adding gateways like crazy.

I've been running it for several weeks now adding a little bit each night,
so it's fairly stable.  You can try out various feature by browsing our
server at http://www.bsdi.com/.  Please keep in mind that currently this
system is on a 56K line so if things are slow you might try back later.
I'll be moving it to a faster net at some point in the near future, but
it will be transparent to the user (it'll keep the www.bsdi.com name).

This server is NOT supported in any way but feel free to send me comments
or bug fixes.  Note that some of the gateways are designed to work on a
BSD/386 system and might require some porting to work on other systems
(the date gateway is a good example).  I've tried to provide some reasonable
documentation for the server so that it will be easier for people to hack
on it.  If you add any neat feature please let me know.

If you think of a good name for it let me know.

Features:
    The Date and Time Gateway
       See the data and time in any timezone (demo)

    The Finger Gateway (with faces support)
       Finger people (demo)

    The Directory Browser
       Include last mod time and size and file/directory indicator.
       Check out http://www.bsdi.com/server/ for an example.

    The Fortune Gateway
       Get a fortune cookie (demo)

    Calendar
       The current months calendar (or you can specify year or month/year)
       (demo)

    Restricted Access Directories
       restrict access by account number and IP address.

    Image Decoding
       Some tools to support image decoding when browsers are able to
       send the x, y coordinates of the mouse click when you select
       the image.  If you have xmosaic and would like an advance demo
       of this check out http://www.bsdi.com/demo/hypermedia.html.
       The patches required for xmosaic 1.0 are pointed to by that file.
       PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, don't use them for production code.
       Only use them for this demo.  I'm hoping I can get support
       for this in xmosaic 1.1 (to do it right requires changing
       <IMG SRC...> to support something like <IMG ISMAP SRC...>
       to enable the new code only on images that support it.

    Directory Search
       Allows regexps on a whole directory hierarchy in a simple fashion.
       Quick enough for about 50 files or 1MB on low volume servers (1
       second search time on a 486DX2/66 running BSD/386).  Above that
       you need something like WAIS.

--sanders@bsdi.com