Good news, JoeDoggers. Siege 4.0.0 is finally out of beta.
While this release contains exciting new features, it’s built upon a major architectural overhaul. For most of you, these changes will go unnoticed but they will certainly make things better for Your JoeDog.
Did you ever look at code you wrote fifteen years ago and wretch? Large portions of this program invoked that reaction. Siege was originally written in 1999 and as such it contained large portions of code that were styled like we coded back in 1999, i.e., suckishly.
Your JoeDog still prefers C to C++ but that doesn’t mean he’s averse to object oriented design. In fact, he loves himself some objects. Just because you code in C doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the benefits of OO design. Afterall, what is an object other than a thing that references itself? With Siege-4.0.0 nearly all code modules were reworked as objects. This makes debugging so much simpler which gives Your JoeDog a happy.
Who cares? What about the features?
- HTML Parser — The most significant new feature is page parsing. When siege makes a request, it will download the page and parse it for elements like style sheets, javascripts, images, etc. It will then make ensuing requests for all those items.
- Cookie Persistence — It persists cookies according to directives set by the server. They are stored in $HOME/.siege/cookies.txt on a thread by thread basis.
- Color Output — Or more importantly, non-color output. Siege 4.0.0 allows you to turn off color output using ‘color = off’ in your siege.conf file.
- Cache Support — Siege has always had some cache support, but this version is more compliant with RFC 2616. See the documentation for more information.
[SIEGE: Release 4.0.0]