main-history - History of NaviServer
America Online acquired a small company called NaviSoft several years ago just before that company delivered a document management and retrieval system called NaviServer. NaviServer was reworked into a World Wide Web server with Tcl, natural-language processing, database management, and was integrated with a suite of document-management client tools. The document manager and editor was called "NaviPress," and the document browser was "NaviGo." NaviPress was groundbreaking in its implementation of the HTTP PUT and BROWSE methods for remote editing of web content. In these ways it was many years ahead of Microsoft Frontpage and Netscape Navigator Gold.
In the years since then, NaviSoft created the NaviHosting service and created a group of software tools around it that was used by GNN, PrimeHost, and the AOL service itself. In 1998 the NaviSoft subsidiary was integrated back into AOL and a new group of people became stewards to the code. This team supported the legacy code and added exciting new features to AOLserver, like ADP server-side HTML scripts, caching--even an FTP server. The team also maintained the many software applications that supported GNN, PrimeHost, and AOL.
Finally, in 1999, the entire AOLserver code base was overhauled and http://news.com.com/2100-1023-228252.html released to the Open Source community as AOLserver 3.0 under the AOLserver Public License, an application of the Mozilla Public License.
America Online continued to use AOLserver throughout its business -- for sites like Digital City (http://home.digitalcity.com/), Netscape (http://home.netscape.com), CompuServe (http://compuserve.com/), to the America Online service (http://aol.com/) itself.
In 2005 new project called NaviServer was created which was a fork of AOLserver 4.0.11.
Later AOL has refocused its business, separated from Time Warner and was acquired by Verizon Communications in 2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL. While the latest release of AOLserver is from 2012, NaviServer continues being actively developed.