Web Proxy Servers (Web Infrastructure Series)

ARI LUOTONEN is Chief Architect of the Netscape Proxy Server. At CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, he headed server development and was co-developer of the first Web proxy server, the CERN Proxy.

Preface
Thanks, Ari. You’re a fountain of information as usual.
Gregg Ulrich

During the four years that I have worked on the fast-evolving World Wide Web technology—specifically proxy servers—I have felt uneasy about the fact that no one has really had time to produce good documentation that would provide true insight and understanding of this great technology. We engineers who understand how things work are often just too busy to explain them to others. After all, an Internet year is just 52 days long, and the average release cycle tends to be less than nine (Earth) months. So many new features, so little time.
I’ve always taken great pride in promptly answering all the E-mail that I get. But there have been times when I have been completely overwhelmed by the number of messages and the span of questions that I have received. And I’ve realized that I have explained the same things over and over again in E-mail. If only there were a book that covered all these issues, people could just read it and receive the same answer I would give them anyway—and maybe learn a bit more and gain depth in their understanding about how things work, and why they work like that.
So one day I got an E-mail from Mary Franz at Prentice Hall asking if I’d be interesting in writing a book on Web proxy servers. Well, not being able to say “no” to more work, I said yes, sure, might as well. I have always found working on the Web to be rewarding. It’s great to receive messages from the Internet, thanking and praising my efforts.