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Thursday, 26 July 2012 by 
Bill Welliver
It all started around the birth of the World Wide Web. In 1993, Per Hedbor put up Sweden's first webserver, the 10th in the world. It was running the CERN webserver (possibly). Per was not happy with the server and wrote his own, called Spider. Version 1.0 was written in C.
After a while, Per started a rewrite of Spider in the language called LPC4, which was written by Fredrik Hübinette. It was based (both in source and in soul) on LPC, Lars Pensjö C, which was used for various LPMUDs. The default mode of LPC4 was to start a MUD. And so, Spider 2.0 was born. Even at this early stage, the server had a modular construction, which was very much ahead of its time.
Due to licensing issues with LPC (and thus LPC4), Fredrik started writing a new language called µLPC. µLPC had a very similar (although not identical) syntax to LPC and LPC4. It also mostly left the LPMUD concept behind. Eventually, µLPC was as good as LPC4, and better in many ways. Once again, Spider was ported to another language. Spider 3.0 was much faster than previous versions. It also got its first graphical configuration interface. Eventually, Spider 3.0 became Spinner 1.0 and around the same time started to be developed by a company founded by five students, including David and Per Hedbor. Today, after two name changes, that company is known as Roxen Internet Software. The Spinner days were probably the best days of the server. It was superior in speed, features and extensibility to anything else that was available. Despite these benefits, Spinner remained a niche product, popular among a loyal group of developers and server administrators.
Yet another name change took place due to trademark issues in the USA. The new name was Roxen®. There were numerous releases of Roxen 1.0 to 1.3 where not much changed except bug fixes and added features. The architecture and APIs were more or less compatible with each other. The most recent Roxen 2.x series are API-wise rather backwards compatible, although there have been major changes internally and RXML is mostly incompatible. Roxen IS is now mainly a product company with commercial products that use the GPL-ed version of Roxen 2.x and above.
The Caudium Webserver, or simply Caudium, is a fork of the Roxen 1.3 code base as of the end of July, 2000. The Caudium Group, which consists of the core developers that work on Caudium, has many goals and plans for Caudium. Mainly, we want a faster, better and less buggy server for ourselves, but we of course also hope that it is something that will be used by others around the globe.
History
Thursday, 26 July 2012 by
Bill Welliver
Spider 1.0
It all started around the birth of the World Wide Web. In 1993, Per Hedbor put up Sweden's first webserver, the 10th in the world. It was running the CERN webserver (possibly). Per was not happy with the server and wrote his own, called Spider. Version 1.0 was written in C.
Spider 2.0
After a while, Per started a rewrite of Spider in the language called LPC4, which was written by Fredrik Hübinette. It was based (both in source and in soul) on LPC, Lars Pensjö C, which was used for various LPMUDs. The default mode of LPC4 was to start a MUD. And so, Spider 2.0 was born. Even at this early stage, the server had a modular construction, which was very much ahead of its time.
Spider 3.0 and Spinner 1.0
Due to licensing issues with LPC (and thus LPC4), Fredrik started writing a new language called µLPC. µLPC had a very similar (although not identical) syntax to LPC and LPC4. It also mostly left the LPMUD concept behind. Eventually, µLPC was as good as LPC4, and better in many ways. Once again, Spider was ported to another language. Spider 3.0 was much faster than previous versions. It also got its first graphical configuration interface. Eventually, Spider 3.0 became Spinner 1.0 and around the same time started to be developed by a company founded by five students, including David and Per Hedbor. Today, after two name changes, that company is known as Roxen Internet Software. The Spinner days were probably the best days of the server. It was superior in speed, features and extensibility to anything else that was available. Despite these benefits, Spinner remained a niche product, popular among a loyal group of developers and server administrators.
Roxen
Yet another name change took place due to trademark issues in the USA. The new name was Roxen®. There were numerous releases of Roxen 1.0 to 1.3 where not much changed except bug fixes and added features. The architecture and APIs were more or less compatible with each other. The most recent Roxen 2.x series are API-wise rather backwards compatible, although there have been major changes internally and RXML is mostly incompatible. Roxen IS is now mainly a product company with commercial products that use the GPL-ed version of Roxen 2.x and above.
Caudium
The Caudium Webserver, or simply Caudium, is a fork of the Roxen 1.3 code base as of the end of July, 2000. The Caudium Group, which consists of the core developers that work on Caudium, has many goals and plans for Caudium. Mainly, we want a faster, better and less buggy server for ourselves, but we of course also hope that it is something that will be used by others around the globe.
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