Shepherd 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

Unfortunately, in many cases, 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 Products:

Shepherd Engine
Shepherd Services
Shepherd Agents
Shepherd Directory Service Providers
Shepherd Developer's Tool Kit

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 Protocols:

IMAP4 (under development)
Fax
HTTP (under development)
SMTP
POP3
LDAP (under development)
FTP
j-Chat
SNTP (under development)
DNS (under development)

Shepherd Services are the implementations of different tcp/ip services in the Shepherd environment.

Directory Service Providers:

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

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.

Shepherd Features
Shepherd Platforms

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