AOLserver is distributed under the Mozilla Public License.

AOLserver was originally developed by NaviSoft under the name "NaviServer", but changed names when AOL bought the company in 1995. Philip Greenspun convinced America Online to open-source the program in 1999.

AOLserver was the first HTTP server program to combine multithreading, a built-in scripting language, and the pooling of persistent database connections. For database-backed Web sites, this enabled performance improvements of 100X compared to the standard practices at the time of CGI scripts that opened fresh database connections on every page load. Eventually other HTTP server programs were able to achieve similar performance with a similar architecture, but AOLserver was several years ahead of the competition.

AOLserver is a key component in the Open Architecture Community System (OpenACS) which is an advanced open-source toolkit for developing web applications.

In Sept 2007, a port of AOLserver for the iPhone was made available.

NaviServer (also hosted on SourceForge) is a fork of AOLserver.

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