Whitebeam is an open source "Web Application Server" aimed to reduce the development cost of sophisticated web applications. Applications are written as a set of XML pages that contain embedded JavaScript.

These pages look very similar to traditional client-side web pages and the skills required are very similar. The resulting environment allows competent client side web designers that have a good understanding of HTML and JavaScript to migrate their skills into server-side development.

Whitebeam integrates Posgres, Apache, Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine with it's own powerful XML/XPath based secure application framework.

NOTE: Whitebeam is licensed under the terms of the BSD License.

Here are some key features of "Whitebeam":

· Open Source
· Extensible XML and HTML parser
· Integrated server side JavaScript programming environment using Mozilla SpiderMonkey engine
· Available for both Unix and Win32 (Windows 95/98/NT/2000) platforms
· Flexible XML interface to object based services.
· Interface builder for C++ services - 'tgen'
Implementation of core, service object model components:
· System - Basic environment (access to server environment & session context services)
· Contact - Provides heiarchies of contacts and access for authentication
· Catalogue - Organise data into a hierarchical categorisation tree. Each item can store arbitrary information.
· Message - Implements email facilities and the implementation of message boards.
· Semaphore - Supportng mutual exclusion for critical application code running potentially on many front-end servers.
· Counter - Supportng atomic operations on numeric variables accessed from multiple Presentation Engines
· Support for multiple application environments
· Fully integrated into the Apache 1.3.x and 2.x environment

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Add a build target, RC script and config file for Debian packages
· Add a configure option --with-pgsql_server, in case the Postgres server headers are not in an obvious or guessable place.
· Look for APR headers in more places, and tidy up some build dependencies which occur in some distributions.
· New 'template/contrib' directory to hold useful but non-core templates.
· First contributed template provides a service to map IPv4 addresses to country for geographically aware applications.