Apache Week issue 338

                                APACHE WEEK

The essential weekly guide for users of the world's most popular Web server.
                        Issue 338: 5th December 2003

                                 In this issue

     * Under development
     * Leaving ApacheCon 2003
     * Featured articles

                               Under development

     Mailing  list  traffic over the last few weeks was dominated by two
     long  threads discussing the state of Apache development and of the
     development  community  in  general.  Stas  Bekman  began the first
     thread,  pointing out the noticeable drop in volume of list traffic
     over the last 18 months, and suggested several reasons why the pace
     of  development  might be slowing down. The second thread then went
     on  to  discuss  the  1.3/2.0  split,  and  whether  integration of
     substantial  new  features for 1.3 should be encouraged. There were
     many  differing  opinions on these topics, and even a few differing
     micro-benchmarks comparing 1.3 and 2.0.

     One  concrete  result  of  the  discussions was an audit of the bug
     database  by  Jeff  Trawick,  ensuring  that  all bug reports which
     included  patches  are  marked  with  the "PatchAvailable" keyword:
     these can now be viewed in a [1]single query.

     The fix for a mod_usertrack bug ([2]BZ#16661) which was included in
     the   recent  1.3.29  and  2.0.48  releases  caused  an  unforeseen
     regression  when  CookieTracking  On  is  used without a CookieName
     directive.  The  workaround  is  to  add  CookieName  Apache to the
     configuration; the new bug is being tracked as [3]BZ#24483.

     Aaron  Bannert made some test tarballs for a first release from the
     "unstable" 2.1 tree [4]available for download; the most significant
     changes  in  the 2.1 tree which have not been backported to 2.0 are
     the  rewrites  of  mod_include  and the authentication modules. PHP
     users might be interested to try out the second beta of PHP 5 which
     was released earlier this month: [5]PHP 5.0.0 beta 2.

                            Leaving ApacheCon 2003

Blog trekkin'

     ApacheCon  2003  has  been over for a couple of weeks; this year we
     decided  that we were going to relax in Las Vegas rather than spend
     all our free time writing up the conference for Apache Week. We can
     easily  get  away with it as the conference was widely covered by a
     number  of attendees and speakers who wrote up their thoughts about
     the  conference  in  all manner of blogs. And amazingly, for blogs,
     some of them have useful insights:

     Conference committee member, [6]Ken Coar, has a [7]detailed account
     of  his  days  as well as a huge selection of [8]photos. Yes, there
     really was a Klingon female at the opening reception.

     One  of  the  best  overviews of the conference was written by Doug
     Daulton  who  leads us through the talks he attended with a summary
     of [9]Day 1, [10]Day 2, [11]Day 3, and [12]Day 4.

     Rod  Chavez  also gives a comprehensive overview of a [13]number of
     talks  he  attended  including the keynotes and sponsored sessions.
     One  of  the  keynotes  was  by  Doc Searles, who has his ApacheCon
     [14]presentation and keynote online.

     At  Apache  Week we tend to focus on the Apache web server and less
     on  the  other  ASF  technologies that are available. Andrew Oliver
     [15]blogs  his  way through some of the Java projects and questions
     the  purpose  of  the  ASF's J2EE project, Geronimo. Mr Oliver must
     have  made  some  enemies as Sam Ruby reports on an aborted plan to
     [16]push  him  into the hotel swimming pool. On a more useful note,
     ASF  documentation  guru  Rich  Bowen  adds  some  insight into the
     [17]closing  panel  where  the Pet Store web site demonstration was
     given by the Geronimo team.

     Also  of note, Adam Trachtenberg [18]gives an overview from some of
     the  Perl  and  PHP  talks  and  [19]Brandt  Kurowski  mentions the
     painfully slow closing raffle.

     Not everyone was happy with the conference, as Todd Bishop wrote in
     the  [20]Microsoft  blog  when  he  found  another attendee who was
     [21]bored  with  ApacheCon.  With nearly four hundred registrations
     it's  quite  unsurprising that there will be a few people with some
     complaints.  All  the attendees Apache Week spoke to were more than
     impressed  by the presentations which were given by the guys behind
     the  technology, not marketing staff. ApacheCon continues to be the
     main  Apache  event  where  Apache  developers  and  users  to come
     together and discuss everyone's favourite software.

In the News

     Also  at  ApacheCon,  the Apache Software Foundation announced that
     they had become one of the first official open-source licensees for
     the  J2EE  certification  test  kit.  More  news  on  this exciting
     development is available from [22]IT News and [23]ZDNet.

                               Featured articles

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

     One   module  which  got  a  lot  of  attention  at  ApacheCon  was
     mod_security,   a  third-party  module  which  can  log  and  block
     suspicious requests. O'Reilly take a look at how this module can be
     used in [24]"Introducing mod_security".

     Rich  Bowen  starts  documenting  [25]A Day in the Life of #Apache,
     whilst helping users with their support problems on irc.
     Dave  Shea  writes about the process he went through when upgrading
     his  Movable-Type  powered  site  from IIS (and ASP) to Apache (and
     PHP), from start to finish in [26]"ASP to PHP, with MT to Boot!"
       ______________________________________________________________

     This issue brought to you by: Mark J Cox, Joe Orton
     Comments or criticisms? Please email us at
     [27][email protected].

     [28]Apache Week is Copyright 2003 [29]Red Hat, Inc.

References

   1. http://tinyurl.com/wvsw
   2. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16661
   3. http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24483
   4. http://www.apache.org/~aaron/httpd-2.1.0-rc1/
   5. http://www.php.net/downloads.php
   6. http://httpd.apache.org/contributors/#coar
   7. http://ken.coar.org/burrow/index?day=2003-11-17
   8. http://ken.coar.org/gallery/ac2003us?page=7
   9. http://www.dougdaulton.com/archives/000287.php
  10. http://www.dougdaulton.com/archives/000288.php
  11. http://www.dougdaulton.com/archives/000289.php
  12. http://www.dougdaulton.com/archives/000290.php
  13. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/3978
  14. http://www.searls.com/doc/apachecon2003/
  15. http://linuxintegrators.com/blog/acoliver/travel/?permalink=0060.html
  16. http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/1652.html
  17. http://www.drbacchus.com/journal/archives/000360.html
  18. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3992
  19. http://brandt.kurowski.net/blog/2003/11/20#apachecon3
  20. http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/001023.html
  21. http://devclue.com/blog/2003/11/17#blair_is_bored
  22. http://www.itnews.com.au/storycontent.asp?ID=10&Art_ID=17140
  23. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39117979,00.htm
  24. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/apache/2003/11/26/mod_security.html
  25. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/apache/2003/12/04/apacheckbk.html
  26. http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2003/12/02/asp_to_php_w/#000266
  27. mailto:[email protected]
  28. http://www.apacheweek.com/
  29. http://www.redhat.com/

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