In this issue

The first ever Apache conference was held in October 1998 in San Francisco. In 2000 there were two other highly successful conferences in Orlando and England. Earlier this month ApacheCon stormed Santa Clara. Now it's back to Europe for the second conference in 2001.

It has been announced that the next ApacheCon Europe will be held in Dublin, Ireland on the 15-17 October 2001. The conference follows hot on the heels of ApacheCon in London last October and the recent ApacheCon in Santa Clara, during which the Apache Web Server beta 2.0 was launched. The location for this ApacheCon couldn't be better, being set in Ireland's largest hotel just minutes away from the lively city centre, and with it's own night club and Irish Cabaret.

Make a date in your diary, and stay tuned to Apache Week for more information about the event. We'll be there to cover ApacheCon as well as to drink our way through the Guinness.

As mentioned briefly last week, the threaded MPM on Apache 2.0 was suffering problems at server shutdown time. In Apache 1.3, signals are used to tell child processes to shut down. This is changed in the threaded MPM in Apache 2.0, where a pipe between threads is used, dubbed the "pipe of death". A related problem emerged that the CGI daemon process (another new feature of Apache 2.0) was not being killed properly at shutdown or restart. Fixes have now been committed for both of these problems.

The decision on whether to include mod_proxy in the Apache 2.0 tree generated a large amount of discussion, which evolved into the more general question of when an Apache module should be included in the server distribution (like mod_rewrite, for instance), and when it is best to distribute it separately (like mod_perl, PHP, and so on). No clear consensus appeared for mod_proxy.

Another controversial issue also arose: the status of SSL support for Apache 2.0. The minimal SSL module mod_tls, which was committed to the Apache 2.0 in February, has remained largely untouched since then. Meanwhile Ralf Engelschall said at ApacheCon that he had started porting mod_ssl to Apache 2.0.

In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that are of interest to Apache users.

eWEEK Labs tests Apache 2.0.16 Beta and provides a brief review about its features and shortcomings.

If you prefer to build Apache from source manually, you may be interested to refer to Apacompile which basically is a set of instructions and examples for compiling Apache and other common modules such as mod_ssl, mod_auth_ldap and mod_php. There are still some configuration samples yet to be completed.

Woody Stanford looks at communications between a PHP Web server hosted on a UNIX system and a local Windows machine in "Inter-Platform Communication (IPC) Using PHP". This tutorial is for PHP experts with a knowledge of networking theory.