Hiawatha Webserver

Hiawatha is a standard developed by Hugo Leisink since 2002 freelance web server. It implements all important functions of a web server.

Functions / features

The program is structured monolithic and dispensed in contrast to most other programs in this category (eg Apache, Lighttpd ) on the ability to load individual modules at the start of the program. Since version 2.0, the program only uses threads, this leads to an improved speed. The latest version also offers some features that are not standard and otherwise can be partially realized only by additional external programs:

  • Support for XSLT
  • Banning: Clients can be blocked at the IP level based on their address of the access.
  • Command Channel: the server can be controlled via a separate port.
  • Support for Virtual Hosts
  • URL rewrite based on regular expressions, denoted at Hiawatha as a URL toolkit.
  • Support for CGI and FastCGI
  • Support of basic and digest HTTP authentication
  • Ipv6 support
  • Monitoring of traffic with Hiawatha Monitor

A complete list of features can be found on the project website.

History

The development of Hiawatha began in January 2002 as Hugo Leisink was not satisfied with the Web servers available at the time according to own data. The focus of the development is on safety, low resource consumption and easy configuration. Next, the course of development:

  • Version 1.0 ( September 2002): First functional version
  • Version 2.0 ( March 2004): Conversion of the program on thread- based execution (instead of fork )
  • Version 3.0 (September 2004): SSL support
  • Version 4.0 (December 2005): Added support for calling external CGI programs
  • Version 5.0 (October 2006): Implementation of FastCGI, initial integration in the FreeBSD ports tree in December 2006, at OpenBSD in March 2007
  • Version 6.0 (October 2007): Implementation of IPv6
  • Version 7.0 (February 2010): Introduction of Hiawatha monitor, based on PHP5, MySQL and Banshee monitoring application that IPv6 is now also available on Windows
  • Version 7.5 (May 2011): Support for the Do- not-track HTTP header
  • Version 8.0 ( January 2012): CMake replaces autoconf and PolarSSL OpenSSL implementation of the HTTP status code: 414 Request-URI Too Long
  • Version 9.0 ( March 2013 ): Using a thread pool (instead of multithreading )

Between these major releases, there were regular updates eg for the security gaps or elimination of errors.

Dissemination

Reliable figures on the number of Hiawatha installations are not available. Since Hiawatha with Lighttpd is best comparable, he speaks mainly to the target group of administrators who want to use a slim as possible web server.

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