Sunday 15 September 2013

Background check

Before deep diving into the server and its architecture, I decided to first look at existing enhancements or latest changes made to it. Along with that, the timeline as I could figure out was pretty interesting.

First look at the boa website [1] lead me jumping to a premature conclusion that the server had faded away in the background as long back as in 2005.
The first official release of boa was in 1996 and after that it did have many revisions and versions, the latest being in 2005.

But what happened after that? Did it lose its importance in the computing world as other better servers came up and Google gave fewer results of boa, the web server when the phrase 'boa' was entered..?
At least it still did appear in the top 5 alternatives to the Apache web server if that was any consolation.
The web exploration of boa the web server was made even more tougher with other popular services being named boa, thankfully they were not web servers!

But boa, being the web server it is, has not lost its relevance. Having low memory requirements and working wonderfully on smaller machines, boa is still operational.
Here are a few pretty recent papers to prove this fact :
i. Design and development of embedded web server based on Arm9 and Linux [2]
ii. The Transplantation of BOA [3]

The papers describe how boa can be transplanted to embedded devices to perform tasks such as network monitoring and for a variety of intelligent appliances based applications. The prospects of an embedded web server are now wider is what the papers also seem to claim.

It is gratifying to know that boa is taken into due notice for various applications and also is one of the foremost contenders for embedded applications.

There is another thing I came across more recently. We are all aware of the hype surrounding any android application. I was elated to find out that the humble web server had an equivalent app for it too [4].

This made me finally conclude that boa was definitely in the game and after all not a wrong choice to spend some time on!


[1]Official web site http://www.boa.org/

Boa is not dead, not yet!

[2] Design and development of embedded web server based on Arm9 and Linux
[3] The Transplantation of BOA Based on Linux3.0.1 and S3C6410
[4] Android app

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