In this issue

ASF chairman Greg Stein sparked off a long debate this week on the development list by drawing attention to an article on Apache 2.0 adoption published last month. The discussion centred around using PHP with Apache 2.0, and the two main problems with doing so: thread-safety issues with the myriad third-party libraries which PHP uses, and the compatibility of the PHP engine API with the Apache 2.0 filters interface. It was accepted that the former problem will take some time to disappear: in the mean time, using PHP with the non-threaded "prefork" MPM under Apache 2.0 is the only recommended combination. Several ideas for fixing the API compatibility problems were exchanged.

As a demonstration of Apache 2.0's support for protocols other than HTTP, Ryan Bloom wrote a mod_pop3 module supporting the mail protocol POP3. The module has remained largely untouched since its inception in August 2001; a proposal to move it into the httpd-2.0 CVS repository has received several positive votes.

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

"JSP Quick-Start Guide for Windows" walks you through the steps of setting up a JSP-enabled Web server on a Windows PC using Tomcat 4.1.18 and Apache 2.0.44. It also shows you how to integrate Apache and Tomcat by using mod_jk as other connector modules such as mod_webapp does not work reliably on Windows and mod_jk2 does not have comprehensive documentation on how to configure it. It ends with an example of a working JSP in Apache.

In the November 2002 issue of Linux Magazine, the article entitled "Live Logs" lists the PHP code for implementing a simple Web interface to query and display useful information from all Apache traffic that has been stored in a MySQL database. This example just provides a list of domains, the total number of requests for each domain, the most recently requested URI of a domain, the most popular URI of a domain, and how many hits for each URI but you can customise the example scripts to output other statistics.

"Creating Your Own CA" talks about Certificate Authorities (CA) and explains how you can act as your own CA by creating your own CA certificate and then signing certificate requests with your CA's key. All these are done with the CA.pl utility, part of the OpenSSL toolkit.