Anyterm reaches 1.0 milestone

Dear LWN,

I was wondering if you might like to mention Anyterm in your esteemed 
publication.

Anyterm is (buzzword alert!) an "AJAX" application that provides a 
terminal on a web page.  Javascript receives keystrokes and sends them 
using XmlHttpRequest to an Apache module, and thence to a 
pseudo-terminal running a shell or whatever.  Shell output updates a 
terminal emulation in the Apache module which is converted to HTML and 
any differences are returned to the browser.  Performance is not bad, 
and you can try the live tetris demo if you don't believe me!

Using SSL it's possible for the session to be strongly encrypted, and 
since everything is just HTTP or HTTPS on the standard ports it all 
works even when there are firewalls in the way.  My hope is that it will 
be useful for people who, like me, need to be able to keep their serves 
running even when they're in an internet cafe in the middle of nowhere 
or behind an inflexible corporate firewall.  (My sites always wait for 
me to go on holiday before crashing...)

This week the stable branch has reached the milestone of version 1.0, as 
I think that this is now good enough for widespread use.  There's also a 
development branch where I'll be adding more experimental features, 
starting with WAP support in version 1.1.0 which was released today.  So 
you can now get a shell prompt on your mobile phone.  Some work is 
needed to make it useable though.  Future plans include merging my 
QWAZERTY keyboard-layout mapping code.

I've been very impressed by the level of interest in Anyterm since I 
released version 0.1 a couple of months ago.  I wrote it to "scratch an 
itch", and that was obviously an itch that other people had too.  Like 
the best open source projects I've been able to build on existing work, 
including the ROTE terminal emulation library and the Sarissa 
XmlHttpRequest wrapper, and I've had lots of useful feedback, such as 
fixes for build problems on odd platforms, from users.

Links:

Anyterm:   	http://anyterm.org/
Tetris demo:	http://anyterm.org/demos.html
QWAZERTY:	http://chezphil.org/qwazerty/
ROTE:		http://sourceforge.net/projects/rote/
Sarissa:	http://sourceforge.net/projects/sarissa/

Kind Regards,

Phil Endecott.