OKWS is a Web server, specialized for building fast and secure Web services. It provides Web developers with a small set of tools that has proved powerful enough to build complex systems with limited effort. Despite its emphasis on security, OKWS shows performance advantages relative to popular competitors. Commercial experience with OKWS suggests that the system can reduce hardware and system management costs, while providing security guarantees absent in current systems.
As of 8 Dec 2011, OKWS is still being maintained and worked on, with 3.1 being the active development version. There are no big feature-development plans on the horizon, but we're regularly committing bugfixes and extensions.
1 Dec 2011
- Move everything over to GitHub for primary project hosting!
7 Jun 2011: OKWS v3.1.13.2
- Fix a bug in the ''fork()'' pub filter, having to do with race conditions in the environment.
3 Jun 2011: OKWS v3.1.13.1
- Fix a bug in the ''len()'' pub filter -- make it UTF-8 aware.
26 May 2011: OKWS v3.1.13
- Bug fixes in sorting with negative floats
- ''sort2()'' that takes a keyfunc, rather than a comparator. Should be more efficient
- Implement python-style recursive list-comparison. Beware that it's not resilient to infinite recursion. Need to fix that eventually.
24 May 2011: OKWS v3.1.12
- ''libaok.so'' no longer depends on the ''okrfn3'' internals.
- a patterned interface for pub filters that use the blocking interface, like the one we had for filters that use the non-blocking interface.
20 May 2011: OKWS v3.1.11
- New libamysql feature -- ''mysql_var_t'', which when passed to ''execute'', is escaped as
foo, rather than 'foo'. This allows for statements of the form "SELECT ? FROM ? WHERE ? = ?". One would execute that statement with ''->execute (mysql_var_t ("a"), mysql_var_t ("b"), mysql_var_t ("c"), d)''. - New library functions: ''log'', ''exp'', ''pow'', ''sqrt'', ''bitwise_or'', ''bitwise_and'', ''splice'', ''shuffle'', ''randsel''.
- Bug workaround: if connecting to logger fails on startup, can cause a service to quit, and then try again. Enable with configuration option ''DieOnLogdCrash.''
25 Apr 2011: OKWS v3.1.9.1
- Fix some bugs and ugly code having to do with Gzip and content chunking. Separate the two ideas better (but sadly not all of the way). Disable chunking for older versions of Safari, which backs out an earlier hack that was breaking flat file service through the Akamai proxy.
21 Apr 2011: OKWS v3.1.8
- A new pub filter called fork(), that allows "fire-and-forget" semantics for blocking pub filters. To make this work, changed the signatures of the pub functions to take a ''ptr<eval_t>'' rather than a ''eval_t *'', and both sides of the fork (the foreground and background) hold a reference to the evaluation state.
27 Mar 2011: OKWS v3.1.7
- A ''raw'' filter that reads raw pub files into a pub string.
- An ''exit'' statement that allows short-circuiting out of an include file. I.e., ''exit'' is to a file as ''return'' is to a function.
22 Mar 2011: OKWS v3.1.6.2
- The ''replace'' pub function has been spruced up: the replacement pattern can now either contain capture groups; alternatively, the replacement pattern can be a lambda as in Python's ''re.sub''.
17 Mar 2011: OKWS v3.1.6
- SSLCipherList support
Feb 2011: OKWS v3.1.5
- Runtime pub profiler to figure out where your CPU cycles in pub are spent (documentation needed)
- HTTP-keepalive now fully supported.
- Allow fully-customizable logger support (e.g., to Facebook scribe). Previously, only ''logger'' was supported.
- Various bugfixes:
- Naive-gzip fixed (though still I recommend using "smart", which is on by default)
- HTTPS client code now behaves more rationally when you ask it to connect to a non-SSL port
- Fix various FD-inheritance issues with services binding directly to ports.
Jan 2011: OKWS 3.1.4
- Automatically kill unresponsive services
- ''xdropq2json'' and ''json2xdropq'' --- convert an XDR opaque buffer into JSON, as long as you tell it which XDR type it is. Go in reverse, too.
Jan 2011: SVN repository moved to ''svn3.okws.org''
Summer 2010: OKWS v3.1 released!
The basic idea behind OKWS is that each Web service you write (such as ''search'' or ''newsletter-subscribe'') should run as a single process. There is no reason to sprinkle the same program across hundreds of address spaces just to get client concurrency. OKWS is built with this principle in mind. A Web service in OKWS is compiled into a free-standing process, calling upon our boilerplate libraries. Other standard helper processes run on the system, to direct traffic, to launch and relaunch applications should they crash, to log HTTP transactions to disk, and to access static HTML templates.
Programming in OKWS follows the single-threaded, event-driven model. No need to worry about the synchronization snafus that creep up when using multi-threaded or multi-process Web servers.
Some example sites include:
OKWS runs on most Unixes, and has been tested extensively on FreeBSD and Linux.
Though OKWS is event-based at its core, A new tool, that is entirely compatible with existing libasync-based code, is [[sfslite::tame2]], which we urge you to read more about. It's a simple C++-level rewriter that makes your event code look more like threaded coded. I.e., you can make a sequence of serial blocking functions within one function body.
OKWS is freely available under a GPL v2 license.
-
Building Secure High-Performance Web Services With OKWS. Maxwell Krohn, in Proceedings of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference USENIX 2004, Boston, MA, June 2004. [ ps | ps.gz | pdf ].
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Events Can Make Sense. Max Krohn, Eddie Kohler and M. Frans Kaashoek, in Proceedings of the 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference USENIX 2007, Santa Clara, CA, June 2007. [ ps | ps.gz | pdf ].
- Max Krohn
- David Koh
- Ben Hollenstein
- Ian Rickard (Apple Darwin Patches)
- Michael Walfish (various patches and fixes for API problems).
- Benjie Chen
- OkCupid team, including Mike Nahas, Tom Quisel, Mike Maxim, Tom Jacques, and Eli Gwynn.