Apache responds to web server criticisms

The Apache Group is trying to encourage take-up of the Apache 2.0 web server by making the product more stable and issuing less frequent alterations to its application programming interfaces.

Apache will continue its strategy of distributing two versions of the software, one for production sites and one for developers.

Apache 1.3x has been considered the stable version suitable for production websites and Apache 2.0 has been the development version, used by only a handful of sites that need its unique functionality and are prepared to work around operational difficulties, according to experts.

In future, it is intended that Apache 2.0 will become a stable version for production sites, while version 2.1 will be a development version with more frequent additions being made to its functionality.

Some users have suggested that few sites run Apache 2.0 owing to the lack of add-in modules to support functions such as Perl and PHP scripting.

Others complain that the handling of Apache 2.0 Java modules is made more difficult because some libraries used by the Java module do not support multi-threading, while others do.

The cost of discovering whether a site can safely operate with this kind of uncertainty is often prohibitive for companies.

However, many users would like to work with Apache 2.0 because aspects of its performance are superior.

One user told vnunet.com's sister title IT Week that he would prefer dealing with Apache 2.0 because it serves more pages using less hardware compared with version 1.x.

Similar performance improvements are also promised by the add-in modules. For example, the Perl module that is under development enables a multi-threaded Apache 2.0 server to improve the running of Perl scripts, compared with the Apache 1.x environment.

One webmaster explained that he managed to delay purchasing new server hardware simply by upgrading to Apache 2.0.

IT Week recently found that Apache 2.0 software is used by less than 0.5 per cent of websites, compared with about 66 per cent using Apache 1.3x.

In the long term, Apache can only hope to maintain its market-leading position if users upgrade to 2.x versions, which are the only ones to properly support new features such as multi-threading.