Here is some stuff from the README file of the original Abyss source
package in 2000.  Abyss used to be an independent package and was included
in Xmlrpc-c for convenience when Xmlrpc-c was created.  Since then, the
code has been greatly modified and extended for Xmlrpc-c.

The original Abyss project was a product of Moez Mahfoudh mmoez@bigfoot.com.


                              ABYSS Web Server
                             ------------------


About:
------

ABYSS aims to be a fully HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Its main design
goals are speed, low resource usage and portability. ABYSS works on most
UNIX based systems and on Win32 systems (Win95/98/2000/NT).

Copyright:
----------

Copyright (C) 2000 Moez Mahfoudh. All rights reserved.

Status:
-------

ABYSS is still in development stage. Actual version is 0.3. Many features
are not implemented yet but the server core works well and seems to be
stable. It is fully reliable for serving static files on medium load sites.
In fact, primary benchmarks show that ABYSS is 70% as fast as Apache when
using the fork system. This rate jumps to 130% when using threads.
On UNIX platforms, some problems occurred because of the use of the Pthreads
library. This will be corrected in the future versions. That's why only the
fork system is usable under UNIX. This lowers performances but guarantees
stability.
CGI/1.1 support is still absent from the current version but will be
included in the near future.

Change Log:
-----------

   * Version 0.3 (March 23,2000):
        o Handles conditional GET requests (by date)
        o Conforms to all the MUSTs of the RFC2616 (newer version of the
          HTTP/1.1 protocol draft)
        o New configuration options (such as pidfile for UNIX systems...)
        o Handles HEAD and OPTIONS methods
        o Many bug fixes
        o Tested on Sun-OS 5.7
        o Second public release

   * Version 0.2 beta (February 7,2000):
        o Handles GET on static files
        o Handles correctly range requests
        o Conforms to 80% of the MUSTs of the RFC2068 (HTTP/1.1 protocol
          draft)
        o Improved code portability (Win32 and UNIX platforms)
        o Tested on Linux 2.2 and Win95/98
        o First public release

   * Version 0.1 (January 2000):
        o Completely rewritten in C
        o Speed improvement
        o New memory allocation scheme (using pools)
        o Never released

   * Version 0.0 (January 2000):
        o Initial version
        o Written in C++
        o Never released

Downloading:
------------

   * Version 0.3 (current version):
        o UNIX package (source) abyss-0.3.tar.gz.
        o Win32 package is not available but you can extract source files
          from the UNIX package and compile them on Windows without any
          modification. (Sorry for this inconvenience: I have no Windows
          machine now to compile the program and to test it. If someone can
          do that, please email me the zipped package and I'll add it here).

   * Version 0.2 beta:
        o UNIX package (source) abyss-0.2b.tar.gz.
        o Win32 package (source+binary) abyss-0.2b.zip.

Installation:
-------------

   * For UNIX systems:
        o Untar/Ungzip the distribution package with a command like tar xvfz
          abyss-x.y.tar.gz
        o Edit the Makefile src/Makefile to meet your system requirements.
        o Go to directory src and execute make.
        o The server binary is generated and stored in the bin directory.
        o Edit the conf/abyss.conf to reflect your system configuration (At
          least change the paths).
        o Goto to the bin directory and start the server by typing ./abyss
          -c ../conf/abyss.conf

   * For Win32 systems:
        o Unzip the distribution package.
        o An executable file is already present in the bin directory.
        o If you wish to recompile the server, open the src/abyss.dsw file
          with Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 or higher and rebuild the project.
        o Edit the conf/abyss.conf to reflect your system configuration (At
          least change the paths).
        o Goto to the bin directory and start the server by typing ./abyss
          -c ../conf/abyss.conf


To do:
------

   * CGI/1.1 support
   * Web based configuration/administration
   * Speed improvement
   * File caching system
   * Throttling
   * PUT method handling
   * ...