With a Web Browser on every desktop but data safely stored away on servers its clear a way to develop Web applications "as easily as one would run a script" would be of great benefit.

OpenPSP is a Web server which can be run by any user and has no configuration files. It will processes compiled CGI scripts as they are developed without the need to fork() as has been the disadvantage of CGI to date. The server also includes support for "Perl Server Pages" (PSP) where perl code can be embedded into documents.

Why "Industrial Strength"?
OpenPSP is very robust, processing requests in a scalable cluster of processes completely independent of each other. While the simplicity of OpenPSP means its main use is for rapid web development and prototyping it is sufficiently reliable for production use on an office intranet.

Design Goals
The number one design goal for the server was that it should be as simple as possible but building in as much functionality as possible. The basic server is only 1000 lines of code with another 1000 lines for the multiprocessing generic server. Despite this the server supports virtual hosting, virtual directories, and is completely compatible with Apache for CGI scripting but with near mod_perl performance.

Why Perl?
OpenPSP is written in perl so that the native language of the server is the same as that of its application scripts. Perl is a language uniquely suited to writing Web applications with language constructs specifically for processing text notably regular expressions. Perl is also arguably the most widely available high level language and is well integrated into both the network and server based data stores such as databases.

To download the server click here: psp_2_1.tgz (70kb).