BoostWorks and its BoostEdge compression products are back under the direction of a few technologists who reclaimed the company.

A group of former employees purchased the intellectual property of BoostWorks when the company was forced into bankruptcy after it "stuggled under the weight of obligations incurred in the buyout" of traffic shaping company Streamcore, according to ActivNetworks, the new company of the original BoostWorks founders, developers and engineering management.

As well as incorporating BoostWorks' products into its products suite, ActivNetworks also offers other application acceleration and front-end devices. BoostEdge sits in front of Web servers and the Internet to speed up traffic using HTTP and HTTPS, compression and content filtering to act on the data traversing the network. BoostEdge was put through its paces in a test by Network World Global Test Alliance back in 2003.

BoostEdge determines what kind of browser is initiating the session so it can customize responses for that browser to minimize the amount of traffic that must be sent. It also uses standard compression that is part of browsers to reduce traffic volume.

The company is offering an API inside the product to help partners add new modules to the device, which would provide a format to enable specific acceleration and specific compression to parts of an application.

ActivNetworks says BoostEdge is among products and technologies that are part of a larger trend the company is calling Application Network Mediation. Company representatives say HTTP is the "new network layer" just as TCP/IP became a standard; HTTP will become the network layer for distributed applications.

"The first wave for adoption is the Webification of all applications," says Armel Bile, marketing director for ActivNetworks European division. "The second wave will be this communication between the applications enabled by HTTP."

According to Bile, ActivNetworks, which competes with the likes of Redline Networks (now owned by Juniper Networks) and NetScaler (which was picked up by Citrix), is the first to move from acceleration to application network mediation, which would equip their front-end appliances with the intelligence to make changes to how content traverses wide-area links.

"We are acting at the HTTP protocol layer and talking with the application at this level. We are able to say that by changing the way the HTTP protocol is talking, we are going to reduce latency," Bile explains.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.