[Xitami] Xitami/5 - new project announcement

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Russel Olinger <rolinger1 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> A) Where do you draw the line on what Xitami 5 will support?

Mainly, Xitami/5 is based on a plugin framework for drivers (e.g. CGI,
LRWP, PHP) and access modules (things like authentication, logging,
etc.).  We'll focus on the framework and things that are complex to
make right, such as virtual hosts, while we hope people will
contribute with drivers and access modules, eventually.

> B) You have your base list of items that you annouced will be in Xitami 5
>       b1: What was the estimated development time for that base list?
>       b2: What do you expect the development time will be for the extended
> feature requests?

No idea, and I'm not making promises. I expect it will take some time
since it's a ground-up new product, not an upgrade of the old one.
But iMatix is moving back into web products with Zyre, so we have a
business reason to make Xitami a great server.

> C) What do you expect Xitami's footprint to be after its completed?  I think
> everyone is hoping for a highly kick-ass, flexable, secure, easy to use
> webserver (like all previous vesions of Xitami) that will still be small,
> light and 1/100th the size of Apache.

The server will remain small, efficient, easy to configure, and
kick-ass.  The current debug build is 4MB. and it runs using 1.6% of
my 1GB RAM, and 0% CPU while idle.

At the same time, it's going to be a lot more sophisticated than
Xitami//2.5.  The platform we use is one we made for OpenAMQ, look at
www.openamq.org and if you want to try building it, and running it,
you'll see the kind of flexibility.  E.g. configuration via text
files, or command line.

The core is multithreaded, scales to many cores, but stays very
efficient.  OpenAMQ can do 600,000 messages a second, so we think
Xitami will be fast.  OpenAMQ is very stable (we spent extraordinary
effort in developing ways to write ultrarobust code), and I expect
Xitami to be very stable too.

> D) When do you begin development and when do you expect to have beta
> versions for the user community to start banging on?

Development has started, and we're releasing code regularly, the next
release is in a week or so.  There is already a version in
OpenAMQ/1.4, if you want to try it.  There is documentation on
http://xitami.wikidot.com.  The code will for the time being be part
of OpenAMQ, but later we'll split Xitami off into a product package of
its own.

Thanks for the interest and feedback.

-Pieter