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Welcome to Savant 3.0, the latest version of the Savant web server. I started programming Savant in the Fall of 1997 as a small web server for my personal use. I just wanted to put up a simple HTML page at the time, and made the mistake of trying to use Microsoft IIS. IIS is a decent web server, but to put it bluntly, it's a pain in the rear to get working properly. It's so loaded with features and switches that you can never find what you want. IIS is also full of security holes that clever people keep discovering, so running IIS turns into a cat-and-mouse game between the server administrator and those bent on mischief. Microsoft's Personal Web Server wasn't much better - at the time, it didn't even let you serve documents anywhere but your local network. Newer versions do, but they suffer from the same problems as IIS. I tried the freeware and shareware programs on Tucows and Cnet, but couldn't find anything that I really liked. Being more than a little frustrated at the time, I decided to write my own. (The fact that I was using this as an excuse to procrastinate doing my computer science homework didn't hurt.) And so Savant was born.

At first, Savant was just a programming toy for me - I'd work on it for a few hours on the weekend when I didn't have anything better to do. I picked the name "Savant" for some odd reason that I don't remember - the word means "wise". Unfortunately, my first few attempts were a little less than Savant - an early one randomly sprayed packets onto the network as fast as it could, creating some interesting network problems one Saturday morning. Another attempt served files a little too well - it served my entire hard drive instead of just the directories it was supposed to. But after almost a year of programming and discovering every way possible to crash Windows 95 (and there are a lot, trust me), the first version of Savant was done in the summer of 1998.

Several years and revisions later, we have Savant 3.0 here before us. This version includes a real-time monitoring console, support for ISAPI applications and WinCGI, better support for CGI, and numerous efficiency and bug fixes.

I'd like to thank you for choosing Savant as your web server. I hope you enjoy using Savant as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Michael Lamont
February 23, 2001