In this issue

It's that time of year when you look back over the events of the last 12 months and wonder just what you spent all your time doing. As this is the last issue of Apache Week for 2001 we thought we'd give you a mini review of the year. Apache Week will will be back on the 4th January 2002. Have a great holiday season and a happy New Year from everyone at Apache Week.

• Featured Articles: We've picked out the best featured articles in 2001.
• Under Development: Apache 2.0 development continued throughout the year, with the first beta release of Apache 2.0 in April with subsequent alpha and beta releases. Apache 2.0 is now close to being released. Apache Week launched an Apache 2.0 information center to co-incide with the first beta release. Most of the developers have focussed on Apache 2.0, but a few minor Apache 1.3 releases were made to fix bugs and other issues.
• Conferences: ApacheCon 2001 was held in Santa Clara and was a huge success, but ApacheCon Europe 2001 in Dublin was canceled due to problems with the conference production company. A new production company was soon found to run future events. The O'Reilly Open Source Convention also had a large Apache presence.
• Security: Microsoft received heavy criticism after falling foul to a number of major security problems prompting the Gartner Group to suggest that all IIS users switch to something more secure, like Apache. Apache has had a few vulnerabilities this year, but none of them are particularly serious. In June the apache.org site got hacked, but this was due to a trojaned version of ssh at another site and not due to software vulnerabilities.
• Surveys: Netcraft show the total number of Apache-based servers found by their survey rising from 16 million in January to 20 million in November, but with little effect to the market share - hovering through the year around 60%.
• Commercial ventures: Both IBM and Covalent released proprietary products based on early Apache 2.0 releases. Two new Apache information sites were released from O'Reilly Network,and Covalent.
• Apache Week: Apache Week celebrated a 5th birthday, we brought back the weekly "under development" section, cut out nearly all advertising, and internally switched to a home-made content management system based on XML and XSLT. Meanwhile the main Apache sites were also receiving a face-lift with an XML back-end processed by Anakia, an XML transformation tool.

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

This week as well as our usual round-up we've put together a feature giving our pick of the top articles for 2001.

Al Williams explains how he wrote a simple Apache module for basic version control that allows Web developers to have two versions of a file on a web server in "Live Debugging with Apache". The idea is to store the development version of a file in a special subdirectory (which is hard-coded) of the document directory. The module, mod_confctl, will intercept each request and look for the required file in this subdirectory first. If the file is found, then it will be used. Otherwise the original file from the appropriate directory will be used.

"Apache Web-Serving with Mac OS X: Part 2" continues where it left off by showing you how to enable CGI and SSIs support. First, it locates Apache's configuration file and log files. Then it points out the directives in the httpd.conf file that are relevant to CGI and SSIs, and describes what they are used for. It assumes that you are familiar with Mac OS X's Terminal application for you'll need to edit and save files via the command line.

PHPBuilder presents an advanced tutorial, "Using PHP and MySQL with Flash", for PHP developers with a good understanding of PHP, MySQL, and Flash 5 Actionscript. It walks you through the steps of setting up a table to store unique user IDs, the x and y coordinates of movie clips for each user and other properties, creating a simple login and registration form, and using PHP to manipulate that table and interact with Flash. The aim is that when users return back into a site movie clips are in the same position as when they logged out. All PHP scripts and Flash source code are included.