[Xitami] What is STEP?

[Pieter Hintjens]

Ervin Kosch <ervink@lmgnet.com> wrote:

> This maybe offtopic but does anyone know what Imatix's STEP program
> do?  Is it a VPN software?  Does it just do HTTPS requests to exchange
> information?  Is it something completely different?

This may be interesting to Xitami users who plan to integrate their 
web server with other applications in the future...

iMatix STEP (secure transaction exchange protocol) is a middleware 
tool that implements a 'store and forward' model.

Two applications that want to communicate will drop their messages in 
mailboxes (typically local filesystem directories or database tables) 
and STEP will carry these messages across the network.  It is a 
'level 7' approach in that we connect at the application level, 
rather than at the network level, as a VPN would do.

STEP is somewhat special because it can work over all kinds of 
network protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, but most interesting: encrypted 
email.  It is also portable, based on the same technology as Xitami, 
and lightweight.  It guarantees delivery of messages even when the 
network fails or systems are down.  It uses OpenSSL to encrypt its 
data using standard public/private keys.

This makes it very easy to connect applications that cannot otherwise 
reach each other: there are no firewall issues, no real security 
issues, and no real performance issues.

We hope to be able to release a free version in the near future: the 
package is robust and has been under development for about two years, 
but still needs some polishing before it's ready for mass use.

-
Pieter Hintjens
iMatix Corporation