In this issue

Apache is now the most popular web server in the world. The April WWW server site survey by Netcraft found that more web servers where using Apache than any other web program. Apache is now in use on 29% of all web servers.

This good news is the subject of an press release that the Apache group have sent out to various news organisations.

Another first

Happy first birthday - Apache is also a year old this week. The Apache developers server and mailing list were established in late March 1995. If you don't know where Apache came from, here's a short history lesson. In late 1994 and early 1995, the NCSA server was stuck at version 1.3. Patches being submitted for the NCSA server didn't get incorporated. So a group of people who wanted to keep developing the server got together, and using the public domain code from NCSA 1.3 developed their own server. There was also some doubt over what the license would be for the next version of NCSA. Because the new server developed from a need to integrate outstanding patches, it became known as "a patchy" server.

While it started off because of a desire to patch NCSA 1.3, Apache was largely re-written to allow external "modules" to be incorporated. Anyone can write C modules to work with Apache, and in fact much of the default functionality of Apache is incorporated into modules. The author of the module features and the programming interface, Robert Thau, is going to present a paper on the Apache modules API at the Fifth International WWW Conference.

Apache now has a lot of new features over and above NCSA 1.3, and while the NCSA server is back in development, Apache has become the most popular web server.

Version 1.0.3 is the current public release. The next version will be 1.1, initially as a beta release (1.1b1), and possibly in April.

The "ScanHTMLTitles" directive used to generate descriptive directory listings was found to be case dependant. It managed to extract the title only from the &ltTITLE> HTML directive.

Here's a list of the major developments this week...

Multithreading

The Apache group continue with testing multithreading. An example multithreaded server based on Apache was written as a proof-of-concept. It is likely to be some time before we see a fully multithreaded Apache being available.

Statistics Module

The statistics module has been extended to show the current requests that are currently being served and the hostname of the requestor. The module has already come in handy to aid tracking a bug in the 1.1 developers release.

Rumours are that NCSA and Apache may be able to share modules at some future date.

Oops

In the last issue we mentioned a new module that authenticates users against a Postgres database. Thanks to Adam Sussman for noticing that we actually meant Postgres95, a different beast altogether.