You can find quite a few IT infrastructures where an HTTP proxy is used to secure the access to the “World Wide Web” (WWW). In smaller company environments you can configure the proxy for each workstation manually. In larger environments you normally use a so called “proxy.pac” for this. This article gives you an introduction to “proxy.pac”-files.
Do you know what: It’s that simple to setup an HTTP forwarding proxy (proxy) with ruby. The only thing you need is webrick’s HTTPProxyServer-class. If you don’t know what a proxy is, please have a look at this article on Wikipedia. In brief: An HTTP proxy is an intermediary server. It is located between the HTTP client and the HTTP server. Using this kind of architecture makes it easier to do virus scanning etc. of web traffic.
