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Roxen the story
Publishing rights
Creators
Acknowledgements

Preface


Roxen the story

Around 1992, the still very academic world of the Internet saw the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW). Per Hedbor, a member of the Lysator computer society at the Linköping University, was disappointed with the then current crop of WWW-servers, so he set out to create his own. Per's creation named Spider was online in 1994 and was programmed in LPC4. Per continued to fix bugs and develop new features, and Spider grew. Soon it was apparent that he needed to do a major overhaul and some rethinking of the basic concepts behind it. The result was named Spinner, and showed two new important design ideas: Modular extendibility and graphical Web-based configuration.

Extensions by modules made it possible for the core program to be small, fast and efficient, while additions of new features in separate modules were still possible. Web-based configuration on the other hand allowed for the server to be maintained in an user-friendly way, without having to edit configuration files or worry about shell environment variables. These are both key features of Roxen today.

Spinner went online in 1995. As the year progressed, we (Idonex) became aware of the market potential of Spinner. Since then, Per and a host of other programmers have been developing Spinner, making it more stable and versatile. Close to the first release in 1996, Spinner had to be renamed Roxen due to copyright considerations.

Nowadays, Roxen is written in Pike, a professional programming language especially suited to network programming. It was developed alongside Roxen by Fredrik Hübinette, another of Lysator's members.

Publishing rights

Copyright © Idonex AB, Roxen Inc. and Roxen Communication AB. First printing: October 1996. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without the written permission of Idonex AB, Roxen Inc. or Roxen Communication AB. Roxen is a registered trademark of Roxen , Inc. Pike is a trademark of Idonex AB. All product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners and recognized as such.

Creators

Programming

Peter Bortas, Henrik Grubbström, Pontus Hagland, David Hedbor, Per Hedbor, Niels Möller, Mattias Wingstedt.

Manual

Funda Denizhan, Johan Gustavsson, Erik Halldorf, Per Hedbor, Kenneth Johansson, Joakim Karlsson, Johan Mellberg, Peter Nordgren.

Quality Control

Henrik Wallin.

Project Managers

Funda Denizhan and Johan Mellberg.

Acknowledgements

It takes many more people than authors to create text. Many thanks to Mikael Widenius and Pete Ashdown for their valuable suggestions and contributions. Many others, too many to mention, have also contributed. Thank you!

Many thanks to those who took the time to comment on the first versions of this manual; Francesco Chemolli, Karin Fransson, Linus Tolke and of course all the others.

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