New Developer / Documenter

[Hassan Syed]

(copy of intro that I posted on new members section in the forums).

Hello Folks !

I'm a 29 yo R&D programmer currently working at @UK plc (www.uk-plc.net) in
the United Kingdom. I am currently working on a Nginx HTTP authentication
module for my company; however I have additional interests in Nginx, I will
outline these below.

My Research Work

I have recently finished a industrial M.Phil with the main software
deliverable being a distributed HTTP tracking mechanism. The idea is to
track users as they use a web-farm, and do this in a way that the tracking
information is present before a request is handled. What this means is that
the tracking mechanism needs to be closely coupled to the web-server so that
the tracking information can be set as a server/CGI variable. The tracking
mechanism has to use the HTTP-cookie mechanism to track state.

Problems that require a tracking mechanism have been solved countless times,
so why is my project important ? It is important because the tracking
mechanism should be as generic as possible, and this is so that the same
mechanism can be used for any sub-system that requires tracking information.
The most general application being web-server/web-application/web-framework
neutral complex event processing.

My web-server alteration were done under IIS 6 using ISAPI filter /
extensions and a custom marshalling service for each web-server. The data
was fed into SQL server using a trickle-feed delivery mechanism. Should
anyone have further interest, I could send them a copy of my Dissertation.

Interest in Nginx

The solution of my work is tied to IIS and has a single distributed-software
architecture (each server has its own marshalling service). My interests are
in implementing the system to enable different topologies, and especially
for it to be web-server neutral; the easiest way to enable this is to
implement it as a sub-system of a reverse proxy -- which Nginx does
marvellously. The original topology needs to be re-implemented as well for
composite event processing, and building on the Nginx "engine" seems a
natural choice.



As I need a deep understanding of the source base, I have been reverse
documenting it for myself. I can perhaps make this available to the
community once it is polished enough. I require some knowledge on the
semantics of the phase handling (i.e., pre/post conditions and functionality
of each phase), and I feel the best way to get this knowledge is to ask it
on the developer forum. I could perhaps document it on the wiki once I
understand it. Therefore access to the developer forum would be appreciated.

Cheers

Hassan.
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