In this issue

Apache 1.3.0 has been released. This is the latest, stable version of Apache for Unix. This is almost a year to the day since the release of Apache 1.2.0, which was made on 5th June 1997.

The release of 1.3.0 marks the end of a seven month beta program, consisting of five separate beta releases. By comparison, Apache 1.2 had a six month beta program with nine betas. The 1.3.0 beta program was:

Version	Release Date	Main Changes Over Previous Beta
1.3b1	16th October 1997	First beta
1.3b2	Never released	Bug fixes, virtual hosts revamped, added NameVirtualHost
1.3b3	20th November	Bug fixes, mod_rewrite re-written
1.3b4	Never released	Replaced mod_dld with mod_so for better dynamic module support
1.3b5	19th February 1998	-C and -c options
1.3b6	20th April 1998	Bug fixes, all API functions renamed, installer for Windows, dynamic loading of modules supported most common OSes
1.3b7	26th May 1998	Bugs fixes
1.3.0	6th June 1998	Minor bug fixes, fix CGI on Windows

Compared to 1.3b7, the full release of Apache 1.3.0 has:

• Various bug fixes, most notably on Windows where CGI programs will work again (they will get the environment variables and start with the fixed current working directory)
• Ability to use a type map file as a custom error document
• Cleanups and fixes for OS/2 and QNX
• Fix the use of $ in SSI directives
• Various internal changes, including a few more symbol renames which were missed out in the big API rename, and renaming of the file md5.h to ap_md5.h to avoid conflicts with system installed md5.h files.

While 1.3.0 is highly stable on Unix systems, it is much less developed on Windows. As such it should really be treated as another beta on Windows systems. It has not received sufficient testing on Windows, and still does not integrate totally correctly with the Windows way of doing things. Amongst the outstanding problems on Windows are:

• There is no clean way to tell Apache to restart. On NT the server can be controlled by the service manager, but on Windows 95 the only way to shut it down is to press Control-C in the console window it is running in.
• CGI scripts have to start with the magic #! line to tell Apache where the interpreter is, rather than using the registry like other Windows servers.
• It has not been tuned for best performance.

New versions of Apache after 1.3.0 are expected to address thse problems.

Apache Site: www.apache.org
Release: 1.3.0 (Released 6^th June 1998) (local download sites)
Beta: None

Apache 1.3.0 is now the current stable release. Users of Apache 1.2.6 and earlier should look at upgrading to this version, which provides additional features has been subject to extensive testing.

These bugs have been found in 1.3b7 and are fixed in 1.3.0.

Because of the major differences between Windows and Unix, these are separated into bugs which affect Windows systems only, and other bugs (which may affect Windows as well). Unix users can ignore the bugs listed in the Windows section.

Windows-specific Bugs

• The default Alias and ScriptAlias directives in srm.conf had the old default path (C:\Apache) rather than the actual install directory.

These bugs have been found in 1.3.0.

• apachectl does not work on SunOS.
• Compilation errors on NEXTSTEP and OpenStep. PR#2293, PR#2316
• Potential compilation problem on systems which do not have O_NONBLOCK fcntl() option. PR#2313

The upcoming Perl Conference in August includes a Perl and Apache track, which covers how mod_perl builds a Perl environment into Apache. The conference will include sessions on embedding perl into HTML documents, database integration and using Java with Apache and Perl.

Apache is still the most widely used server on the Internet, and what's more, its use is still growing faster than all other major servers. The figures from the June 1998 Netcraft Server Survey show that Apache is used on 49.05% of servers, up 0.79% from last month. By comparison, Microsoft's servers grew by 0.58% and Netscape's fell by 0.56%.

When servers which are derived from the Apache code are included, Apache runs at least 53.88% of the servers on the Internet, up 1% compared to last month.