Jigsaw Overview

Jigsaw is a full blown HTTP server. It is entirely written in Java. Its design goals were:

Portability: The Jigsaw server will run on any machine running Java.
Extensibility: The server can be extended by writing new resource objects. This is a replacement for CGI, where server extensions have to be written as processes (of course, CGI are handled too).
Efficiency: The design has been done in such way to minimize file system accesses. By using some caching mechanisms, the server will reduce file system accesses (eventually to the point that most requested documents serving will require no file system access.).

News and Updates

Jigsaw 1.0alpha3 is now available for the public
Release notes
Several new papers are available on Jigsaw:

Jigsaw design rationale
If you want to understand why Jigsaw has this funny design.
Jigsaw performances evaluation (updated for 1.0alpha3)
A quick report on the current performances of Jigsaw. Includes some of the thing we are going to work on to make Jigsaw fly.

Authors

Anselm Baird-Smith
Contributors:

Jeff Dripps: Provided lots of feedback on running Jigsaw on the Mac.
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen: Provide lots of design ideas for the HTTP client side, among with invaluable help on how to implement HTTP/1.1.
Antonio Ramirez: Wrote the code for server side includes and image maps, contributed to the new filtering model.

Status

Still under development. The alpha release is now out. We are expecting your feed-backs before freezing the current set of APIs.

Plans and Activities

The W3C Activity statement reports the direction in which W3C is heading for the future of Jigsaw.

Platforms

The server will run on any platform supporting Java. At this time, it has been tested on Win95, WinNT and Solaris 2.x.

Getting the distribution file

Jigsaw release files contains the Java source code, the documentation and the pre-compiled classes. There are available in two formats both through the FTP and HTTP protocols (you may want to check the Jigsaw mirror sites for public versions only):

FTP: The zip file is suitable for Windows.
The tar, gziped file is suitable for UNIXes.
HTTP: The zip file is suitable for Windows.
The tar, gziped file is suitable for UNIXes.

Copyright

The Jigsaw server is covered by the MIT Copyright statement

Known bugs

The current list of known bugs, along with their status.

Mailing list

The www-jigsaw@w3.org is a public mailing list for open discussions on Jigsaw. For more information on W3C mailing lists, check out the Mail Information page. Check out the archive before posting. Bug reports, questions on the current design, etc. should be directed to jigsaw@w3.org.

Getting more information

Anselm Baird-Smith
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