Whitebeam...

...is an Open Source "Web Application Server" aimed to reduce the development cost of sophisticated web applications. Applications are written as a set of XML pages that contain embedded JavaScript. These pages look very similar to traditional client-side web pages and the skills required are very similar. The resulting environment allows competent client side web designers that have a good understanding of HTML and JavaScript to migrate their skills into server-side development.

Want to know more? These links will give you a good overview of Whitebeam and it's capabilities:

• Overview of Whitebeam applications
• Whitebeam architectural overview - what is it?
• How Whitebeam compares with ASP, PHP and JSP (for those famliar with those technologies)

LATEST NEWS:
18^th October 2007, After a long gestation, Version 1.1.5 has now been released. A lot has changed since our last 0.9.37 Beta release, one of the biggest being a change in license to use a standard BSD license - allowing much more freedom in what you can do with Whitebeam.

Click here to see the full release notes

The Whitebeam architecture integrates two popular and robust Open Source platforms - Apache and Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine - with it's own powerful XML environment and security architecture. The XML environment provides both event driven and DOM based manipulation of XML trees along with the powerful XPath querying language - all controlled via simple server-side JavaScript interface.

Whitebeam provides an extensible XML based interface to back end objects on any platform, the client model securely segregates thousands of customer applications within a single server. Interfaces currently exist to Postgres, SMTP (email), HTTP (to access SOAP etc) and most recently to LibGD, providing image manipulation

Building and Installing Whitebeam

Full instructions on how to build Whitebeam and get the basic service running can be found on our installation pages

Getting Started

News/Releases (change details here)

18th October 2007 : Whitebeam 1.1.5 released. This is a major update following several years continual development. Performance has been improved significantly and functionality extended to include graphic manipulation, 'chat' server templates, audit trail support amongst others. The biggest non-code change has been a move to a BSD style license paving the way into wider application development and adoption.

5th October 2005 : Whitebeam 0.9.37 released. Significant improvements in the contact and catalogue templates. New template to handle 'site' (global) data, providing a more efficient replacement for this common scenario other than using the catalogue template or storing the data in files! This release fixes several minor issues, including a fix to the PostgreSQL database replication engine that prevented it building on Fedora Core 3 installations.

14th April 2005 : Whitebeam 0.9.35 released. Major release. The build system has been substantially revamped to remove dependancies on the Apache source tree. Building is now significantly easier! This version has been tested with Postgres 8.0.1. Postgres replication is now supported, and the distribution includes a high speed alternative to the DBmirror.pl script from Postgres. The file template has been re-written to remove the use of Postgres Large Objects (necessary to enable replications).

31st December 2004 : Whitebeam 0.9.32 released. This version further enhances Whitebeams SQL interface to the excellent PostgreSQL database. Support for a new XML tag : rb:insertblock has been added as the result of user feedback. This release also fixes a seroius bug in the context server (session manager) and all existing users are recommended to upgrade to this release.

This is also the first release that has been tested against version 8 of the Postgres database. Previous releases have been tested against version 7 only.

29th September 2004 : Whitebeam 0.9.30 released. *Major* enhancements. This release adds two important features to Whitebeam. The first is a raw Postgres interface allowing applications to create and access Postgres databases on the fly. We've written a detailed technical note on the Postgres API. The second is write access to the virtual servers file system. There have been a number of minor improvements both to the code and to the build system.

5th August 2004 : Whitebeam 0.9.28 released. Improvements to the build system to allow build on recent Linux distributions. New experimental templates. Performance improvements.

29 June 2004 : New Whitebeam template to interface with Analog web stats analysis package. This template allows web developers using Whitebeam to provide their clients with graphical web-stats withouth them having to install applications or download log files. Support is included in CVS now and will be released shortly with documentation in the 0.9.28.

2 January 2004 : Whitebeam 0.9.27 released. Both the contact and catalogue/directory templates have been significantly enhanced to provide better search, sort and select facilities. This is also the first release to include the new Sempahore template.

22 July 2003 : New 'Semaphore' template under CVS. This will appear in the 0.9.25 release for those not using CVS.

22 July 2003 : Whitebeam 0.9.24 released. Mainly a bug-fix release this time. Clearing the decks ready for a more functional release shortly! It's in the download area Downloads.

7 Feb 2003 : Whitebeam 0.9.23 released. Improvements to the templates, XPath and a number of bug fixes. It's in the download area Downloads.

1 Jan 2003 : The XPath testbed has been improved. This tool allows you to experiment with XPath expressions live and serves to illustrate some of the XML characteristics of Whitebeam.

10 Dec 2002 : Whitebeam 0.9.22 is now available. This release minor functional changes and fixes to XPath and to the new SmtpRequest class introduced in 0.9.21. It's in the Downloads area.

19 Nov 2002 : Whitebeam 0.9.21 is now available. Major addition of SmptRequest - allowing complete control of SMTP e-mail messages. Also includes a number of bug fixes to both the code and the build environment. Comments and bug reports are encouraged! It's in the Downloads area.

19 Nov 2002 : SmtpRequest Class added to the Presentation Engine allowing the creation of multipart email messages and avoiding the message size limit of the message template. Details in the tutorial section.

11 Aug 2002 : Whitebeam 0.9.20 is now available, this is 1.0 release candidate 4. Improvements to error handling and file access. Comments and bug reports are encouraged if you want to see issues fixed before 1.0! It's in the Downloads area.

27 Jan 2002 : Whitebeam 0.9.18 is now available, this is 1.0 release candidate 3. The most noteable change is the move to an 'autoconf' build system. Comments and bug reports are encouraged if you want to see issues fixed before 1.0! It's in the Downloads area.

17 Nov 2001 : Whitebeam 0.9.16 is now available, this is 1.0 release candidate 2, containing several small bug fixes.

7 Nov 2001 : Bug tracker for Whitebeam now enabled on Sourceforge, please report problems there

7 Nov 2001 : Whitebeam 0.9.15 is now available, this version is considered 1.0 release candidate 1.

Details of past releases and their contents are available from the downloads area.

Please follow the About and Application Guide links to find out more about how Whitebeam will allow you to more rapidly develop dynamic www content