ShimmerCat was a

web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initi ...

designed from ground-up for

HTTP/2 HTTP/2 (originally named HTTP/2.0) is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used by the World Wide Web. It was derived from the earlier experimental SPDY protocol, originally developed by Google. HTTP/2 was developed by the HTTP Working ...

and written in

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming lan ...

; it now appears to be an image optimization and distribution service. The purported purpose of the server was to take full advantage of HTTP/2 features, including HTTP/2 Server Push, to enhance the perceived page load speed of served websites. ShimmerCat used machine learning to accelerate asset delivery to the browser.

Overview

As of September 2016, ShimmerCat was at version 1.5.0 and ran on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and

OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. The software could be used for development of web applications through its SOCKS5 and HTTP/2 implementations, and it was also possible to develop web applications without having to modify /etc/hosts nor use different sets of URLs for development and production.

References

{{Authority control Application layer protocols Internet Protocol based network software Proxy server software for Linux Reverse proxy Unix network-related software Web server software for Linux