About FOXY

FOXY is a filtering web proxy server (FOXY = Filtering prOXY).
Originally designed to provide device-independent access to the World Wide Web, it can also be used for a variety of related tasks such as HTTP filtering, extraction and reauthoring of existing web content, or even as security device against web-based attacks (XSS..).

This project is currently hosted at SourceForge.
For further information, you may also want to visit FOXY's SourceForge project page.

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Documentation

This is a research prototype. Hence, we do not provide a complete User's Guide yet.
Nevertheless, we offer a provisional (i.e. selected chapters of the Master's thesis ^[1] discussing FOXY) version for download (PDF).
Auto-generated (and therefore not really pretty formatted) HTML versions of this document are also available online (one large page / multiple pages).

Help and examples:

Description	File Format
FOXY User's Guide	PDF	DOWNLOAD
	HTML (single page)	VIEW ONLINE
	HTML (multiple pages)	VIEW ONLINE
FOXY's example page ^[2] (see Quickstart )	HTML	VIEW ONLINE
Auto-generated description of FOXY's example configuration (see Quickstart )	HTML	VIEW ONLINE

¹: Viktor Moser. "FOXY - A Proxy for Mobile Web Access". Master's Thesis. Technical University of Vienna, February 2006
²: Naturally, filtered versions of the presented examples will not be available until your browser has been configured to use FOXY as HTTP proxy (see Quickstart). top

Prerequisites

Java Runtime Environment (1.4 or higher, 1.5 recommended).

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Install

Just download the distribution of your choice and unzip (Windows) or untar/gzip (Linux) it to a folder on your harddrive.

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Quickstart

A straightforward way to start FOXY is by executing the run-script located in the main-folder of the distribution (either run.bat or run.sh). This script starts the proxy server in a small shell which provides general server information (listening port..) and allows changes of the configuration (i.e. filtering behavior) at runtime.

Before you can take advantage of FOXY's filtering capabilities, your browser must be configured to use FOXY as HTTP proxy server :
Assuming FOXY's default settings (listening port: 8080) have not been modified and that the browser and FOXY are running on the same machine (for a quickstart, we strongly recommend to run the proxy server locally), following settings of the browser's HTTP proxy configuration would be appropriate: Host: localhost, Port: 8080.

After the proxy server has been started and the web browser is configured properly, a quick overview of FOXY's functionality may easily be obtained by opening the included examples.html-file ^[2] (online version here) in the browser.
This document lists some web sites that are filtered by FOXY by default. It also gives a brief overview of the transformation-techniques applied to these pages during the filtering process. (NOTE: In some cases, an explicit reload of certain pages may be required to bypass possibly existing cached versions.)
In addition, a more detailed description of FOXY's default filtering behavior (i.e., an auto-generated description of FOXY's default configuration) is available online here.

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License

FOXY is an Open Source software package. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2.

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Download

Distributions:

Description	Filename	Operating System
Binary package. Includes transformation-examples.	foxy-bin.zip	Windows	DOWNLOAD
Binary package. Includes transformation-examples.	foxy-bin.tar.gz	Linux	DOWNLOAD
Source package. Includes Java source-code, API-documentation, XML Schemata of the configuration files, some helpful scripts, and much more.	foxy-src.zip	Windows	DOWNLOAD
	foxy-src.tar.gz	Linux	DOWNLOAD

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Author

FOXY has been developed in the course of the work on Viktor Moser's Master's Thesis ^[1] at the Institute of Information Systems (Distributed Systems Group) at the Technical University of Vienna (project advisors: Schahram Dustdar, Engin Kirda).

Contact: Viktor Moser top