Preface
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## Preface

## ICAP and the lack of java implementations

ICAP (Internet Content Adaptation Protocol) was designed to encapsulate HTTP requests and responses that they can be sent to a ICAP capable server which can either modify or notice the HTTP messages. With this in mind the Protocol is made for HTTP based entry server and proxy servers like Squid to off load message processing.

As seen above ICAP will never be as popular like HTTP. But since HTTP is so popular and the demand for HTTP message processing in Security entities such as entry servers or reverse proxy servers is getting bigger, ICAP has become a protocol that is relevant and important.

The initiator for this project of building a JBoss Netty ICAP codec was the simple fact that there are roughly two ICAP implementations in Java, the problem is that both implementations are bound within a complete server infrastructure. In other words, no JEE environment is supported and therefore is the enterprise usage of ICAP as a server almost not possible. When building such a server there are always demands such as "load balancing", "administration via web-services", "jmx", "gui". These cannot be simply meet by the current implementations.

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