QuickHTTPD

What is it?

QuickHTTPD is a piece of middleware. It is Open Source, backed by a DTD-based XML configuration structure and has been developed with efficiency and flexibility in mind. It is a pure Java application with no external dependencies and can be run on any platform that provides a 1.4 JVM (for a C# .NET 2.0 implementation of this technology, see the LPC).

It is an open mechanism that can be easily adapted to service requests from a variety of services, to send appropriate loosely-tied responses from customisable document sources and to perform arbitrary processing based on the requests. In this regard "QuickHTTPD" is a misnomer.

Out of the box, the QuickHTTPD can be used to provide:

• An embedded web-server with on-the-fly compression or decompression capabilities
• A dedicated web service
• A dedicated web application
• A thin web-server to act as a façade for a complex web application
• A limited proxy server
• Sample code for developers interested in building a web server

QuickHTTPD is only a framework, and as a consequence when customized it probably won't be as agile as a dedicated purpose-built component. It may only be of value to your organisation for prototyping.

It is used successfully by Lothian Productions to form the backbone of a caching system.

How does it work?

The provided API defines interfaces for RequestListeners, RequestHandlers and DocumentSources. A RequestListener listens for an incoming request (usually on a given port) and passes on any request it gets to a RequestHandler. The handler interprets the request, converting it into a document request. The document request is then sent to a DocumentSource which returns a document to be streamed back to the requestor.

The simplest implementation works as follows:

ServetSocketRequestListener	(listens on a port specified in the XML configuration for incoming requests)
HTTPRequestHandler	(interprets the request data as an HTTP request)
FilesystemDocumentSource	(serves the requested document from the server's file system, as specified by the XML configuration)

Future goals for QuickHTTPD

It is only partially complete, although it's fully functional for the purposes described above. A number of incomplete refactorings are marked with FIXME comments in the code.

Goals include:

• Adding JMS listeners and sources
• Improving the logging format and mechanisms (it's currently in common Apache format)

Where can I get it?

Here:

Last release build 0.9

Last release build 0.9 Javadocs

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