[squid-users] light weight ICAP server that isn't dead :o)

[Amos Jeffries]

On 10/02/2015 12:00 p.m., Luis Miguel Silva wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I'm looking for a light weight (opensource) ICAP server project that isn't
> dead.
> I need to create some custom content filters but, I'm having a hard time
> finding an ICAP server that is being actively worked on...
> 

The ICAP servers you are looking at are framework servers that "just"
decode the on-wire protocol and pass it to a plugin module, and reverse
that for the results. That is all they have to do and its quite simple,
the protocol itself is 12 years old. So you wont really see huge amounts
of ongoing change in any of them.

Theres a whole other category of ICAP server, such as AV vendors. They
get a lot more active turnover on their software, but are all about
custom integration for the filtering activity they do rather than
generic plugin engines. And again most of the code churn is in the
filtering parts not the ICAP bits.


> In the squid wiki <http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/ICAP#ICAP_Servers>,
> I was able to find the following ICAP server implementations:
> - C-ICAP <http://c-icap.sourceforge.net/>
> -- lates release was in October 2014 (which is pretty good) but the latest
> version is 0.3.5. *How stable is it?*
> - Traffic Spicer <http://spicer.measurement-factory.com/>
> -- Squid's docs point to this page <http://spicer.measurement-factory.com/>
> but I couldn't even figure out where to download it or find any
> documentation for it.
> - ICAP-Server <http://icap-server.sourceforge.net/>
> -- latest version for it is 1.2.1 but it is dated from October 30, 2002.
> - POESIA <http://www.poesia-filter.org/>
> -- this one points to a German page that doesn't seem to have anything to
> do with ICAP...
> - GreasySpoon <http://greasyspoon.sourceforge.net/>
> -- this one seems to have been discontinued
> 
> The most interesting one seems to be C-ICAP but I don't like that it hasn't
> even reached a 1.0 version...
> 
> What do you guys recommend I adopt?
> 

c-icap.

Though I have to disclaim a slight bias. The c-icap author is one of our
more active Squid developers.


You might also look into eCAP. The design intention is that you build an
eCAP module which can plug into either the c-icap engine for access over
ICAP or be loaded by Squid for faster processing directly on the HTTP
traffic flow.

Amos