Christos Tsantilas web page

Other ICAP Servers

Open Source ICAP Servers

I know only two open source ICAP servers currently available: (1) ICAP-server, which is available at http://icap-server.sourceforge.net, and (2) an ICAP server developed as part of the Poesia project.

ICAP-server was developed by Geetha Manjunath, who also implemented the initial version of the Squid ICAP client. It is written in Python on top of the Medusa Web server and has been sponsored by Hewlett Packard Labs. It includes an API for writing "proxylets" and an IRML implementation. In my opinion, Python or other interpreter-like languages such as Perl is not the right tool for developing such services. The project seems to remain stalled.

Poesia was a project financed by the European Commission. Its goal was to build Web filtering software. Currently, it includes an ICAP server and tools for filtering pornographic images, natural language text filtering for English, Spanish and Italian, as well as URL, PICS and JavaScript filtering. The main drawback of the project is that code has been written by using three different programming languages: C/C++, Java, and OCaml, while the filters implementation has been based on a large number of different software packages such as Java, OCaml, glib, atk, pango, gtk+, xstr, pcre_ocaml, ocamlnet, PXP, netclient, CamlZip, and PICS/DSig Standard Library. This has resulted in a very difficult installation procedure.

At Poesia's CVS repository at sourceforge.net, there is no activity for the last months. In the future, I am planning to look into the project's source code and examine its image and text filtering mechanisms. I am particularly interested in learning more about the use of statistics and the effectiveness of algorithms that they have employed.

Commercial ICAP Servers

Most antivirus and content filtering suppliers include ICAP servers on their products.