NaviServer

NaviServer
Original author(s)	NaviSoft
Developer(s)	Bernd Eidenschink, Ibrahim, Stephen Deasey, Gustaf Neumann, Vlad Seryakov, Zoran Vasiljevic
Stable release	4.99.30 [1] / 26 January 2024;19 months ago (26 January 2024)
Written in	C, Tcl
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Web server
License	Mozilla Public License
Website	GitHub Repository SourceForge

NaviServer ^{[2] [3]} is a high performance web server written in C and Tcl. It can be easily extended in either language to create web sites and services; there are over 35 modules available (including database integration or protocol support for UDP, SMTP, LDAP, DNS, COAP, etc.)

The project is under active development, NaviServer is mostly written in C with a very well-commented source code, had more than 6,000 commits made by 35 contributors representing more than 100,000 lines of code. ^[4] NaviServer is licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

Recent new features include:

• an internal watchdog for automatic server restarts
• server internals exposed in a command line mode
• thread shared arrays (atomic operations, dict support)
• built-in caching with cache transaction semantics (cache commit/rollback)
• hot code swapping (update code in the running system without server restart)
• asynchronous spooling of requests and replies
• delivery of static files optionally with gzip or brotli compression with automatic re-compression on updates
• selective logging with color highlighting (non-blocking)
• efficient built-in crypto support
• mass virtual hosting
• byte-range requests for streaming and resumption of downloads
• rich HTTPS support (server and client-side SNI, OCSP Stapling)
• built-in HTTP/HTTPS client support, with log-files
• built-in statistics (for mutex locks/rwlocks, cache, db-handles, ...)
• bandwidth management via multiple connection thread pools
• WebSocket and IPv6 support

History

NaviServer is based on AOLserver (version 4.10), AOL's open-source web server. The NaviServer project started as a fork of the AOLserver project in July 2005. ^[5] It is different by supporting multiple protocols, providing higher scalability through asynchronous I/O and aims to be less conservative with new feature development.

Historically NaviServer was the original name of the server, a closed-source product by a company called NaviSoft in the early 1990s. ^[6] It was bought by AOL in 1995, and released as open-source in 1999 as AOLserver after they released Mozilla. This friendly-fork takes the code back to its original name.

Large applications of NaviServer are the ArsDigita Community System and OpenACS in particular.

See also

• Comparison of web servers
• OpenACS

External links

• NaviServer Home page
• NaviServer GitHub Repository
• NaviServer Bitbucket Repository
• NaviServer Documentation

References

1. "NaviServer - Browse /naviserver/4.99.30 at SourceForge.net".
2. NaviServer Project
3. Official NaviServer NaviServer Source Code Repository
4. "NaviServer statistics from Open Hub"
5. "naviserver-4.99.0"
6. "The Web Tools Review on Servers"