[AOLSERVER] AOLserver Project Update

[Jim Davidson]

Dear AOLserver Community Member:

As you may have noticed, we've been making some changes with our management of the AOLserver project here at AOL.  Basically, we're applying some lessons learned from other successful OpenSource projects such as Apache to provide better support for you in the community.  To help you understand these changes, I'd like to provide you some background on AOLserver including my role in the project.

AOLserver began in 1994 as NaviServer, the server for a web publishing toolkit from a small startup company in Santa Barbara, California called NaviSoft.  NaviServer included many innovative features for that time including the ability to publish pages directly from the NaviPress WYSIWYG editor/browser, integrated database connectivity, and the Tcl scripting language.

I joined NaviSoft in the fall of 1994 and took responsibility for the NaviServer project a few months later.  Just weeks after I started, NaviSoft was acquired by AOL.  While we released NaviServer 1.0 as planned in mid-1995, we began to focus more and more on AOL's specific requirements.  Eventually we stopped selling NaviServer, renamed it GNNserver, renamed it again to AOLserver and provided it free for download in binary form (I think all that happened in 1996 but the dates are fuzzy now).

I left the project in the fall of 1996 and moved to Virginia to startup a team working on Digitalcity.com, an AOL venture.  The remaining AOLserver team members continued to work on AOLserver, delivering binary-only releases 2.2 and 2.3 and the OpenSource version 3.0.  The 3.0 release was a huge effort to simplify and cleanup the code for the benefit of the OpenSource community.

For various internal reasons at AOL, right after the 3.0 release the AOLserver dev team moved on to other projects.  Because we were using AOLserver quite a bit at Digital City, I took responsibility for it once again.  Truth be told, I was still tinkering with the code and figured it wouldn't be too hard to keep up with any critical bug fixes.  This turned out to be true and worked fine over the past few years -- the maintenance burden has been light and we've had great results supporting additional sites on AOLserver including MapQuest.com, Moviefone.com, and Netscape.com.

What hasn't worked as well is the OpenSource project.  To date, we haven't been very consistent in our involvement in the project.  Bug reports and feature requests which aren't relevant to sites we run at AOL have received very little attention and the documentation is out of date and riddled with lies.  Also, the new 4.0 release which I've been working on for quite some time, as time permits, is about a year behind were I expected it to be.  I'm sure many in the community wonder what's driving the 4.0 work and what that means for the 3.x code base.  Finally, we haven't made it easy for folks to contribute to the code base, leaving much of the maintenance effort (light as it is) on me and other AOL engineers.

So, basically AOLserver has had a long, eight year history and while it has proven useful here at AOL and elsewhere, the OpenSource project isn't as useful as it could be.  To address this I've assigned responsibility for the project at AOL to Nathan Folkman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), a development manager in my group.  Nathan has been working with AOLserver in my group since way back in 1996 and has a deep understanding of how large scale sites can be built and operated.  Kriston Rehberg, who was a key contact for AOLserver in the past, will be focusing on internal AOL users going forward.  I plan to continue as a contributor to the project but Nathan will be your primary contact from AOL.

To get started, Nathan has a few key objectives for the remainder of this year:

- Elect a small, core team that will provide continued guidance for the AOLserver project.

- Prioritize and manage the resolution of all bug fixes and minor updates to the 3.x series.

- Publish the rationale behind the 4.0 version and a roadmap for it's release.

- Refresh the documentation, starting with the 3.x version.

- Update aolserver.com to make it easier to find things.

As before, resources available at AOL are limited so more than ever Nathan will be looking for you to get involved in these efforts.  We're also looking for you to continue contributing to the growing list of AOLserver modules and to provide each other support and feedback.  I'm confident with your help AOLserver will continue to be a great platform for developing high performance, dynamic web services.  Thank you for your continued support!

Jim Davidson
Vice President
Web Services & Publishing
America Online