Design Philosophy
There are many projects that are trying to make Linux easier to use as a desktop operating system. This is a great goal, but SME Server has taken a different tack. By focusing on only one application - the communications server - we have been able to greatly simplify the user interface.
We have seen that as the use of Linux expands, distributions have become more complicated as they strive to meet the needs of as many users as possible. However, the SME Server stands out from the crowd by keeping features to a minimum. This is the most important design goal of our software. Although it's inevitable that we will have to add features to meet the needs of our increasingly wide user base, simplicity will continue to be the focus and we will never add two new parameters when one might do.
As you study the SME Server architecture, you will see that most parameters are stored in the /home/e-smith/configuration file. You will learn more about this file as you study the SME Server architecture in more detail. Our primary metric of simplicity is the size of this file. The smaller it is - while still meeting the needs of as many users as possible - the more successful we will feel we have been.
Our second most important design goal is to make it as easy as possible to extend the SME Server software, if more power is needed than is provided by our standard interface. To this end, we have made our architecture very open, and have written almost everything in the popular and powerful Perl programming language.
There are other important design goals that should be mentioned here as they do play a significant part in our decision-making. These goals are:
- Easy installation - the installation procedure should be fast and seamless, and should not require detailed knowledge about networking and maintaining servers.
- Security - the SME Server and Gateway must always provide the highest practicable level of security for the services it provides.
- Easy maintenance - Maintaining the server software itself and additions should be easy to maintain with a minumum of administrative tasks
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