Hi,

After more than 3 years of development, we are pleased to announce that 
Ocsigen has now reached version 1.0.0!

Ocsigen is a research project aimed at developing new programming techniques 
for the Web. It contains:
 - a fully featured Web server, with lots of extensions,
 - a programming framework, called Eliom, providing an innovative way to 
create dynamic Websites in OCaml.

The Web server has all the features required to be used as a replacement for 
Apache (or others). It is very easy to implement extensions to it in OCaml. 
Among the features that come with Ocsigen are:
 - a CGI module to use Web sites written as CGI scripts (for example trac on 
ocsigen.org, or even PHP pages through CGI),
 - a reverse proxy module (with pipelined requests) to use Ocsigen together 
with another Web server,
 - a powerful, findlib-aware, configuration file with access control and 
authentication,
 - a content deflation module
 - user configuration files (beta)

Eliom is the most innovative part of the project. It is a programming 
framework for dynamic Web programming in OCaml which introduces high-level 
concepts that make programming very concise and safe. The goal is to make 
large pieces of code easy to maintain and evolve. For example:
 - it is possible to check statically the types of html fragments so as to 
guarantee the validity of pages (with respect to W3C recommendations). Type 
checking is done either using polymorphic variants or with OCamlDuce,
 - pages are generated by OCaml functions with an abstract notion 
of "service". This ensures that there will be no broken links, and no wrong 
parameter names,
 - the full taxonomy of services closely matches the needs of Web developers,
 - it uses continuation-based Web programming for handling the "back button",
 - it provides a powerful session mechanism,
 - etc.

Eliom is not a Content Management System, but is intended to be the basis for 
such higher-level tools. Several projects have already been initiated by the 
community, like Nurpawiki (by Janne Hellsten), Litiom and Lambdium (by Dario 
Teixeira), or Ocsimore (by Piero Furiesi and Jaap Boender). We think that the 
project is now mature enough for wider dissemination and we hope some of you 
will be interested in joining the community to develop new sites with Eliom!

Version 1.0.0 is only the beginning of Ocsigen's story. We have many things in 
mind for the future. We have already been working, for the last few months, 
on a version 2 which will make it very easy to write Web sites that are 
highly dynamic on both client and server side.

Ocsigen is developed as a collaborative open source project. If you need any 
features that are not implemented, please feel free to contribute!

Ocsigen is a research project of the PPS laboratory (CNRS, université 
Paris-Diderot). It is developed by Vincent Balat, Jérôme Vouillon, Gabriel 
Kerneis, Stéphane Glondu, Denis Berthod, Jaap Boender, Piero Furiesi, 
Thorsten Ohl, Nataliya Guts, Jérôme Velleine and Pierre Clairambault. I 
really want to thank all of them, and also the whole community of 
beta-testers for their very interesting contributions.

We hope that you'll enjoy this version, and we wish you happy programming with 
Eliom!

Vincent Balat [for the Ocsigen team]