Xitami

Xitami is a Web and FTP server, originally developed by iMatix Corporation as a free, open-source product from 1996 to 2000. It ran as a single process with a small footprint. It was not as fast as the fastest servers but scaled well. It supported several web application protocols and was very portable. It also had a web interface to configure the web/FTP server.

In 2009, iMatix launched a new version of Xitami, called X5 (Xitami/5).

History

iMatix started the original Xitami server in 1996 as a demonstration of its "SMT" multithreading technology for building protocol servers. The name was chosen at the last minute when the developers realized that their original choice ("Cosmos") had already been taken by another web server that no longer exists. "Xitami" is "iMatix" spelled backwards.

Xitami was featured in an April 1997 article in Dr. Dobb's Journal. The web server attracted people looking for a fast but simple web/FTP server, mainly on Microsoft Windows.

Xitami was designed to be portable, and was ported to Windows, Linux and other Unices, OpenVMS, BeOS, and OS/2. All non-portable functionality was encapsulated in a library layer called SFL (the "standard function library"). SFL was a free and open source project and was used fairly widely in other such projects. In 1999, the Apache web server adopted a similar approach to portability for Apache2, building the Apache Portable Runtime (APR).