In this issue

An issue commonly faced by administrators running load-balanced web servers using Apache is that the "ETag" header returned for static resources can differ across the farm of servers, since the file's inode number is used when calculating the ETag. As the ETag is used to determine whether or not a cached resource has changed (in a browser or proxy cache), this can cause an unnecessary performance hit as resources are fetched more often than is required.

To work around this problem, the FileETag directive has been added to Apache 2.0 and 1.3 to allow the administrator to determine which of a file's properties are used in the ETag calculation. For example, FileETag MTime Size would mean that two files with the same size and modification time would have the same ETag regardless of the inode number.

Investigation of the high loads generated by 2.0 on the live server at apache.org is progressing; current theories are targeting interactions with the FreeBSD poll system call.

Bob Liu reports on Apache 2.0: What's New and Who'll Benefit, giving a brief history of Apache and covering some of the new features in 2.0, concentrating mainly on the Windows port:

...with the release of 2.0, Windows users now have a Web server that is specifically designed to support their platform, yet, is more reliable and secure.

not to expect to see the final version [of 2.0] released before March

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

"Writing Apache SOAP-RPC-Based Web Services Using Java[tm] Technology" provides you with the steps to install the Apache SOAP implementation and develop a simple SOAP-RPC-based Web service with a client to connect to it. It also includes instructions on using Tomcat as the servlet container for the Web service.

You may be interested to find out the results of benchmarking "Linux/apache/PHP vs Windows 2000/IIS/ASP". That is if you know how to read French. If not, you can always try your hand at interpreting the output of online translation tools.

"Building A PHP-Based Mail Client (part 2)" continues with the task of writing a POP3 mail reader which is able to handle MIME attachments. First it shows how MIME attachments work by using an example and then proceeds to write the code to manipulate the attachments.

Read all about the United States Census Bureau's testimonial on open source software such as MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, and PHP. May open source be with you!