HTTP Servers

Leading Open Source HTTPServers

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April of 1996. The October 2003 Netcraft Web Server Survey found that more than 64% of the web sites on the Internet are using Apache, thus making it more widely used than all other web servers combined.

Jetty

Jetty is an open-source, standards-based, full-featured web server implemented entirely in Java. It is released under the Apache 2.0 licence and is therefore free for commercial use and distribution. First created in 1995, Jetty has benefitted from input from a vast user community and consistent and focused development by a stable core of lead developers. There are many more examples of Jetty in action on the Jetty Powered Page that has selections from among the tens of thousands of production Jetty instances.

LightTPD

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility--all of these describe LightTPD which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a HTTP webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) LightTPD is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems.

Nginx

Nginx [engine x] is an HTTP(S) server, HTTP(S) reverse proxy and IMAP/POP3 proxy server. It's pretty efficient for high volumes web sites, especially when serving static files.

Other Open Source HTTP Servers

Roxen WebServer

Roxen WebServer is a full-featured open-source web server distributed under the GPL license. It runs on a number of different operating systems including Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X.

Some of the strong points of this server is:

Open source code.
A web-based interface for easy configuration and administration.
The highly regarded Roxen graphics support which can be used for dynamic generation of e.g. headers, images and charts.
Integrated MySQL database.
Server-side programming via RXML, Java, Perl, PHP, CGI scripts and more.
Strong encryption.
Modular architecture where server extensions can be loaded without shutting down the server process.
Platform-independent architecture makes custom modules portable with no extra effort.

Open Web Server

Open Web Server is derived from the core of Sun Java System Web Server 7.0. Open Web Server is a highly scalable multi-threaded HTTP engine capable of handling hundreds of thousands of simultaneous HTTP connections. Open Web Server includes common interfaces for adding dynamic content including SHTML, CGI, FastCGI, and its own native interface, NSAPI. With connector plugins Open Web Server can easily be used with popular Java application servers such as GlassFish, Geronimo, Tomcat, JBoss, and more.