AOLserver is America Online's open sourceweb server. AOLserver is "the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world" (as presented on its official site). AOLserver is multithreaded, Tcl-enabled, and used for large scale, dynamic web sites. America Online, or AOL for short, is a corporate online service provider and Internet service provider. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... The term web server can mean one of two things: a computer responsible for serving web pages, mostly HTML documents, via the HTTP protocol to clients, mostly web browsers; a software program that is working as a daemon serving web documents. ... Tcl (originally from Tool Command Language, but nonetheless conventionally rendered as Tcl rather than TCL; and pronounced like tickle) is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout that is generally thought to be easy to learn, but powerful in the right hands. ...
AOLserver is distributed under the AOLserver Public License, which is similar to the Mozilla license.
AOLserver was originally developed by NaviSoft under the name NaviServer, but changed names when AOL bought the company back in 1995. NaviServer See Also: AOLserver ... America Online, or AOL for short, is a corporate online service provider and Internet service provider (ISP). ... 1995 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
AOLserver is a key component in the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) which is an advanced open-source toolkit for developing web applications. Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) is an advanced Open Source toolkit for developing community web applications licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL. The Open Architecture Community System provides: A large set of applications, that can be used to deploy web sites that are strong on collaboration. ...
A fork of AOLserver also exists on SourceForge, the project homepage is naviserver.sourceforge.net
AOLserver offers many of the same features as Apache: it is released under an open-source license, is easy and flexible to configure and offers an API for writing plugin modules.
AOLserver probably would have remained relatively unknown were it not for a combination of events: AOL made binary copies of the program available at no cost via the Internet, and Philip Greenspun began work on the ArsDigita Community System.
Note that AOLserver's configuration file looks for both your computer's name and its IP address, so if you are connected to a network, you will not be able to point your browser to localhost, but will instead need to use its full name.
AOLserver is robust, stable and scalable, after all it has been perfected for years by a tight group of programming wizards.
As an example: the source code embedding PHP in AOLserver is half the size of the similar code that embeds PHP in Apache (this "benchmark" should be taken with an appropriate grain of salt but it gives a rough idea of extension API quality).
AOLserver's story in this department is very compelling: it is the only major web server that comes with a tightly integrated scripting language (Tcl) out-of-the-box.