OTM: A web server with a "One Track Mind"

Last night I decided to sit down and write a web server from scratch. Since it seems to be reasonably feature complete at this point, I've decided to unleash it upon the world. (The only thing I can think of to add would be a GUI for those who are command-line phobic).

I've named it OTM since it is a webserver with a "one track mind." And when I say one track mind, I mean it. The differentiating feature of this web server is that it will respond to every single request the same way!

Possibilities include:

• Redirecting all requests to another website
• Serving up a static file (be it HTML or some kind of downloaded content)
• Display a templated HTML message
• or just some plain text

Before you laugh, I can think there of a couple of niches where this type of web server could hit a sweet spot...

1. When you need to take a website down for maitenance, but don't want to muck with changing your regular webservers configuration—just shutdown the regular webserver and fire up OTM with a placeholder message.
2. When you want someone to be able to snag a specific file off of your desktop quickly & painlessly.

Here's a link to the source code. Like my NNTP proxy, it is written in Tcl.

—Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, June 26, 2005 at 23:08