The Shweby proxy server is hosted on Sourceforge.net platform. Its web site is http://shweby.sourceforge.net. The Sourceforge platform will offer to our project a large diffusion in the open source community. We will be pleased to find people contributing to Shweby development and tests.
Shweby is not a finished product. The next step in developing Shweby is the configuration web interface.
In release 0.9.1 of Shweby, there is a web interface obtained by typing http://shweby in the web browser. We must change this URL to the machine name, in order to respect the naming plan of network administrators. In addition, the web interface don't know anything about ICAP. Thus we must implement setting up ICAP classes and services, and selecting ICAP classes in the access lists.
The Middleman web interface is written on C. We think that this is not the best choice to implement a web interface. It would be simpler to write it with a scripting language (Python, Perl, ...). The web script can communicate with the proxy process by different manners (signals, CGI, embedded interpreter, etc)
The ICAP RFC [2] describes some mechanisms that upgrade performances and save bandwidth. The OPTIONS method allows the client to know what type of content the ICAP server is interested in. The preview mode enables the client to send a "preview" of the content, i.e. the HTTP headers and a small part of the beginning of the body. If the server needs to consider the entire file, it will ask the client to send it, else it will deliver the response. This mode can be helpful for other types of applications like virus scanning, image conversion, etc.
Our target is to run Shweby in many purposes. So we will test its interoperability with other products, even commercial products. But the non-scalability of Shweby is a handicap for its use in a large context. Thus we may upgrade the Shweby core design to more performance and scalability.