In this issue

This week an Apache 2.0.19 tarball was made available for testing, although it was soon discovered that a last-minute change to the scoreboard code meant that there were serious problems with the threaded MPM. The code was fixed soon after but it seems unlikely that this tarball will be released publicly.

One of the benefits of Apache 2.0's design is that it allows a module to add support for a protocol other than HTTP to the server. To demonstrate this, Ryan Bloom announced that he has written a POP3 protocol module for Apache 2.0. It is not yet decided whether this module will be developed under the auspices of apache.org.

Recent commits to the CVS repositories include several improvements to the FTP handling in the Apache 2.0 mod_proxy from Victor Orlikowski, and a large amount of work on the modular memory system "SMS" code in APR.

ApacheCon Europe 2001 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.

The agenda for the conference was made available this week. The conference has less talks than previous ApacheCons, but there is no compromise on quality, and ApacheCon gives you the opportunity to meet the main players behind the Apache technologies.

Apache Week will be there to cover the festivities, and to drink our way through the Guinness. Find out more at the conference web site, or read our account of ApacheCon 2001 Santa Clara.

Only a few weeks and Apache Week will be heading off to the coast of San Diego, California for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. You need to register soon if you want to join us and meet the leaders of more than 14 critical open source technologies - including Apache. The schedule looks pretty packed, and last year we just couldn't find time to attend everything that looked interest (Read our account of the 2000 convention). This year we are looking forward to the scheduled live debate on Open Source with Microsoft.

Register now, or find out more at the conference web site.

It has been a few months since we last reported on new figures from the Netcraft and E-Soft surveys of web sites. Netcraft find that Apache and servers based on Apache now have nearly 65% market share, and E-Soft report 60%. In the secure server space, E-Soft find Apache and Stronghold together have 61% market share. These percentages have changed very little since we last reported on them back in December 2000.

Netcraft have recently developed a technique to try to find out how many of the sites they query are hosted on the same machine, as some sites run many thousand virtual hosts from a single copy of Apache. They found that Microsoft Windows has a signifcantly higher share of the web when counted by number of machines are counted. They conclude that although "Apache running on various Unix systems runs more sites than Windows, Apache is heavily deployed at hosting companies and ISPs who strive to run as many sites as possible on a single computer to save costs. Windows is most popular with end-user and self hosted sites, where the host to computer ratio is much smaller."

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

It's another one for Mac OS X as "Building Apache 1.3.19 and PHP 4.0 for Mac OS X 1.0" looks at installing the latest version of Apache Web server directly over the Apple supplied binaries. It includes instructions for updating WebDAV, and adding PHP support, but not enabling support for SSL.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier walks you through the process of setting up and running a few benchmark tests against Apache using autobench and httperf in "HTTP Benchmarking, Part 2". The tests are performed on both the Debian x86 and SPARC distributions but will apply to any UNIX-based OS running Apache.

Daemonnews brings you an article which takes advantage of SSL/TLS by adding mod_ssl to the Apache Web server. It shows you how to build Apache v1.3.19, mod_ssl v2.8.2, and OpenSSL v0.9.6a from source.

For complex web applications, it is sometimes necessary to separate presentation from logic. The Developer Shed presents one of the many ways to do this by using PHP and an external class called FastTemplate.