JacobRosenberg.net

When I arrived at AOL in 2001, various groups in the company were developing no less than 3 (three!) different web server platforms. Why did we have so many, what ever happened to them, and what were they all about, anyway?

We had (alpha-sorted): AOLserver, iPlanet’s Web Server, and Netscape’s NPE.
AOLserver:

Originally developed by a company called NaviSoft by two guys named Jim Davidson and Doug McKee, AOLserver featured a WYSIWYG page editor called NaviPress. The company was acquired by AOL and the application was open sourced around version 3.0. AOLserver is heavily threaded but single process, has a built-in scripting language using Tcl, and continues to be developed. It runs like a champ under load, it has some fascinating (if arcane) features, and a small but fanatical group of developers. Like many success Open Source products, it has acquired a bit of a life of its own. Their project on SourceForge shows a release (4.5.0) on June 27th, 2006.

It is unclear if there is any continuing development going on at AOL. Still, AOLserver is still used by AOL. Many major web sites (www.aol.com, www.aim.com, moviefone.com, etc) are AOLserver.

iPlanet Web Server:

The Methuselah of web servers, iPlanet Web Server was perhaps the first mass appeal web server in the professional space (CERN doesn’t count). Netscape Communications Server begat Netscape Commerce Server begat Netscape Suitespot begat Netscape Enterprise Server begat iPlanet Web Server. This was one of the oldest and most stable web servers we had, and it had every crazy feature developed in the earlier days of the web. It had one of the very first useful servlet containers, ran rock solid for months or years, and pretty much ran like a champ. That’s a good thing, since the configuration syntax was cryptic at best (magnus.conf and its fantastic whitespace sensitive format), it’s logging style was neolithic, SSL support was frustrating, and the command line management features were somewhat weak. There was a GUI, which pretty much spoiled us on management GUIs forever. I still have nightmares about the “administration server”. Anyone who administer web servers in the 1995-2000 era probably knew a trick or two to survive this beast.

AOL sold the Enterprise Software group which developed NES, NDS (LDAP), and Certificate Server to Red Hat in 2004. Directory Server and Certificate Server are still marketed, and include NES in the package, but it doesn’t appear Red Hat sells this stand-alone anymore. At its peak, NES ran products from Netscape.com to AOL Calendar to dozens of Netscape and AOL branded web sites. At the time of the iPlanet divesture, Sun also got a copy of the product and continues to develop it.
Netcraft reports that Sun (which includes several of Netscape’ products) accounts for around 193,140 sites in June of 2006.
Netscape’s NPE:

NPE, which probably stood for either Netscape Personalization Engine or Netscape Portal Engine, was an outgrowth of the specialized software originally built to facilitate the MyNetscape product. NPE started life as an application server, but grew into a full-fledged web server. It was heavily threaded, designed for complex applications with state and personalization, and featured a popular template language (affiliated first with the .tmpl and later with the .psp extentions). NPE’s best friend is Netscape Directory Server (LDAP), and often was found in proximity to it. At its peak, NPE ran sites as diverse as Personalization (MyNetscape/MyAOL/etc), Authentication (AOL’s Screen Name Service), Communication (AIM Express, the web-based pre-AJAX version of AIM), and Portals (the AOL Netbusiness product).

Development of NPE ended sometime in late 2004/early 2005. The few products which still NPE are rapidly moving to new platforms, including J2EE (of which PSP was a predecessor) and .NET.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.