Overview

Shepherd is a dynamic, object-oriented, extensible framework for developing high performance, minimal resource Internet servers.

In many cases, organizations use only one machine to deliver all of the major Internet services such as POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, HTTP, and FTP. Often, these Internet services are provided through different software packages. Those software packages use many common components to complete their work such as:

• User Lists
• Access Control Lists
• Configuration Data
• Remote Administration
• Thread Pools
• Event Logging

What the user ends up with are different configuration interfaces, separate users lists, separate access control lists, multiple thread pools, etc. resulting in poor performance, difficult administration, and more demanding hardware requirements. Shepherd combats these problems by defining an object-oriented framework for developing Service components that plug into the Shepherd Engine.

Shepherd consists of several products:

• Shepherd Engine
• Shepherd Services
• Shepherd Agents
• Shepherd Directory Service Providers
• Shepherd Developer's Toolkit

The Shepherd Engine controls the loading and unloading of the Directory, Services, and Agents. It also manages the common thread pool and provides access to Shepherd Directory Services (SDS) through a command line interface.

Shepherd Services are the implementations of different tcp/ip services in the Shepherd environment. J&J plans to offer some, if not all, of the following protocols:

• IMAP4 (under development)
• Fax
• HTTP
• SMTP (available now)
• POP3 (available now)
• LDAP (under development)
• FTP (in beta)
• j-Chat (available now)
• SNTP
• DNS

Part of Shepherd's strength is its generic Directory Service Provider (DSP) design that will allow different storage mechanisms to be implemented seamlessly into all Shepherd Service Components. J&J plans to offer the following Directory Service Providers:

• JDB-DSP: Object-oriented Database (available now)
• LDAP (under development)
• Shepherd.Admin-DSP (available now)

The Shepherd Developer's Toolkit will allow others to take advantage of the Shepherd Framework for their own products or in-house server development.