Web server
 
Caudium, an alternative to Apache?

Antonin Billet, 01net., the 24/04/2001 at 18h34

Distributed under the GPL license, Caudium is a powerful and secure web 
server  well adapted for distributing dynamic web pages. Its main
drawback is missing full documentation.
 
The Caudium Web Server was created because of Roxen Challenger 1.3 users 
frustration. Roxen Internet Software who developed it shipped Roxen 2.0 last
year which is slower and incompatible with the version 1.3 thereof, 
according to its detractors.
 
As a result, some developers decided to create Caudium. This web server has
been available since March 2001 as version 1.0 and improves the security and the 
performance of Roxen Challenger 1.3, which intends is aimed primarily at the 
Internet service providers.
 
"We would like that Caudium could handle a maximum number of request in 
a minimum time says Xavier Beaudouin, one of its developers. Thus, we 
have developed cache memory which limits disks accesses when 
static web pages are requested repeatedly."
 
There was no other choice for the American SecurityFocus site (a 
reference site about the security on the Internet), and for Real Software 
which both chose Caudium 1.0 in order to serve their web pages.
 
An advanced script language.
 
In terms of functionality, Caudium uses RXML (Roxen eXtended Markup 
Language), an advanced script language developed by the Roxen company. 
This language allows the developers to create their own meta-tags just as does XML,
but provides extended functions such as cookies management, querying the 
SQL databases, etc.
 
RXML language is one of the strong points of Caudium, because it allows 
faster and easier development of dynamic applications for web sites.
 
Caudium also provides an XSLT processor named PiXSL based on the Sablotron 
library for dynamic web page generation.
 
A modular structure
 
Even though it is far less famous than its counterpart Apache, Caudium sports 
some advantages: it is preemptive and deals with SSL (Secure Socket 
Layer).
 
It is, moreover, equipped with a multiple layers server (HTTP, proxy, FTP, 
gopher, wais) and supports trade objects.
 
The only weakness of the product is its lack of documentation which 
causes it deployment a bit harder for beginners.
 
At the moment of the development stage, the 1.1 version will integrate 
CAMAS, a web mail especially conceived and sized for the Internet service 
providers.
 
Coming from the free software world, Caudium's project which is hosted 
by SourceForge is open to volunteer developers. Caudium 1.0 is available 
as download on the editor's web site for UnixUnix®® and Linux environments.