Welcome to ServerFramework.com

ServerFramework.com is a new website that we’ve put together to make it easier for users and potential users of the licensed version of our high performance, I/O completion port based client/server socket framework to find all of the information that they need. As many of you know, I’ve been working on the code that forms The Server Framework since 2001 and it’s been used by lots of our clients to produce highly scalable, high performance, reliable servers that often run continuously 24/7, all year round. Up until now the code hasn’t really had a consistent name; but that’s changed. Although the documentation for the libraries themselves will still refer to them as “Socket Tools” and “Win32 Tools” etc. the whole package of what was formerly “the licensed code” is now The Server Framework.

With the launch of ServerFramework.com I’m also cleaning up how you get hold of the free version of the framework. Back in 2002 I first wrote about my server development efforts over at www.CodeProject.com and with those articles I gave away an early version of the framework. That code is still available, it’s unsupported but it’s still a great way to kick start your development efforts if you don’t want to pay for a license for The Server Framework. You can now get hold of the latest free code, now known as The Free Framework, from the download page here as a single zip file.

Something else that’s a little new is WASP. I’ve been building custom application servers with The Server Framework for years now and so have my clients but sometimes people don’t need a fully customised server solution. Sometimes you just need a robust networking layer that you don’t need to worry about. WASP is a pluggable application server that’s free for non-commercial use. WASP is, in effect, just another example server that ships with The Server Framework and if you have a license to The Server Framework then you can customise it and learn from it as you do all the other examples. The big difference with WASP is that you can also download the compiled binary and, due to its pluggable design, you can write your own business logic and simply plug it in to WASP. Let WASP take care of the ‘highly scalable, high performance’ part of networking whilst you get on with writing your server. As I said, WASP is free for non-commercial use and the idea is that if you’re considering purchasing a license for The Server Framework then you might be able to get a pretty decent prototype up and running using WASP to evaluate the performance that you get from The Server Framework. Of course WASP is limited, but simply buying a license to The Server Framework gives you all the code that you need to remove those limits and customise your application server as required. You can download WASP from here.

This blog will be in addition to my technical blog over at Rambling Comments. The stuff that I post here will always be directly related to developments in The Server Framework whereas the stuff over at Rambling Comments will be more technically diverse.

So, on with the show…