2.1. What is Caudium?

Caudium is a Web server based on a fork of the Roxen Challenger 1.3 WebServer. Like Roxen, Caudium is written in Pike with parts written in C for performance reasons. Pike is an interpreted language developed by Frederik Hübinette and Roxen Internet Software (RIS), a Swedish company which also created the Roxen Web Server. Caudium, like Pike, is distributed under the terms of the GPL license; several companies and people are involved in its development.

Caudium features include:

• Single-process architecture.

• Optional multi-threaded mode.

• Backwards compatible with Roxen 1.3 on the API and RXML level.

• Runs on many Unix-like systems (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX, Darwin/MacOS X).

• Web based interface for easy administration.

• Built in SSL capabilities. Enabling SSL on Caudium is as easy as filing a web form.

• Written in Pike. Unlike most web servers, you don't need to learn C or C++ and those pesky details like memory allocation to enhance the server's capabilities.

• Extensible with custom modules.

• Powerful API.

• Lots of standard modules distributed with the server, including an FTP server, the CAMAS web mail application, and the UltraLog log analysis tool. The "module" directory in Caudium 1.2 with CAMAS contains 192 code-only files. Most of the modules are in a single file.

• RXML language. RXML stands for Roxen eXtensible Markup Language and is a set of tags, containers and simple programming language constructs that you put in your HTML source. Those tags and containers will be interpreted at run-time by Caudium. This allows non-programmers to do development.

• XML language. Using Sablotron, Caudium can render XML pages processed with XSLT, DOM and XPath. You can find more information on Sablotron on http://www.gingerall.com/. It allows you to use pages designed for Apache mod_xslt in Caudium without modifications. Also the output of these generated pages can also be parsed by our RXML parser before sending the result to the client.