The Apache Software Foundation's Apache HTTP Server, version 2.0.35, has now been released for General Availability. You can find the official announcement, and download the server, from their website. Be sure to try a mirror first. Congratulations to the HTTP Server Project for getting the final release out. If you are wondering about it being usable in a production environment, you should poke around Slashdot's servers and see if you are surprised (now if only mod_perl was finished we could move more of our servers over to using the new release).

Irish writes "This IBM developerWorks article discusses the theoretical underpinnings of SOAP's type system. Its a good article for anyone who wants to learn more about SOAP's programmatic support or to simply better understand Apache's SOAP."

An anonymous reader writes: "Anyone ever had to set up virtual hosting on a server that allows CGI execution, etc? This seems to be simple, until you want to keep users out of each other's data. The Apache config seems straightforward enough, but I still haven't figured out the best way to set up the user groups on the box to keep them trapped in their areas and out of each other's business. I thought I could put each user in his own group to block prying eyes on the system side, then add the web user to all the other user's groups allowing him to get to their files, using suexec to prevent one user from using the web server to look at another user's files. This works well, but there seems to be a limit on the number of secondary groups a user can be a member of. So, the web user hits a wall at roughly 16 "customers" or user accounts. Any suggestions on how to improve on this and get beyond the limit? Or is there a better way to approach this than the group/suexec thing? Any pointers to online resources dealing with this type of config would be great..."

rbeattie writes: "This morning at JavaOne it was announced during the keynote that Sun and Apache have come to an agreement securing the basic right to implement Java specifications in open source. Apache actually went as far as issuing a Press Release about it with information about the agreement. One of the cool things is that Sun actually agreed not only to change various licenses and contracts, release the testing code, but also to let qualifying non-profit open source groups use their 1800 support number while testing." (This is a followup to this earlier story indicating that such an agreement had been reached.)

fishnuts writes "Apache 1.3.24 was released with the usual new security fixes, bug fixes, and features. Here's the announcement."

The Jakarta group had raised some concerns over the proposed Java Specification Participation Agreement. After some hemming and hawing, it appears that the Java Community Process chair (Sun) has agreed with the ASF's concerns - but IANAL ^? . If you have more info, paste it below.

sbsea1 writes "Here is another instance where Microsoft is going one way and everybody else going to other. eWEEK Labs found that Microsoft is using a different implentation of digest authentication which differs from the W3C's digest authentication standards. Internet Explorer Version 5.0 and higher--as well as Microsoft's IIS Web server--has a significant security incompatibility with other major Web browsers and with the Apache Software Foundation's Apache HTTP Web server."

Yogidabear writes: "According to the Apache group, Open Source has been officially locked out of the Java process with JSR 99 (Java Specification Participation Agreement). The article on the Jakarta site notes that IBM in particular voted against this JSR and many others noted that they were not happy with the stance Sun was taking against Open Source. What does this mean for the Open Source community as it relates to Java? And, better yet, what does this mean for Java?"

Voivod writes: "Inspired by the recent Slashdot and Evolt discussions about Blocking Bad Spiders, we set out to write an Apache module that solves this problem. The result is Robotcop and it's ready for action. We believe that it's the best solution to protecting Apache webservers from spiders currently available. Install it and help us make life hell for e-mail harvesting software!"

Christian Bjerre writes: "Currently I'm using Squid as an webaccelerator to sit infront of apache and serve static files (.html .js .gif .png .jpg). Squid also serves my dynamic content which is .php files. My goal is to let Squid or another opensource program gzip the html, since I have Squid installed on another machine, where cputime is not an issue. I've been reading page up&down and Squid dosen't seem to support gzip encoding in Webaccelerator mode. I haven't tried feeding it gzipped html, which could be a solution, if there was a way of having Squid handle all content as binary. What do you guys & girls do to minimize bandwidth usage? // chris"

Fons Rademakers writes: "ROOT-Apache (aka Carrot) is an open source scripting module for the Apache webserver. Based on the ROOT framework which is using C++ as scripting language, via the CINT interpreter, it has a number of powerful features, including the ability to embed C++ code into HTML pages, run interpreted and compiled C++ macros, dynamically extend the framework with external libraries, access and manipulate databases, and generate graphics on-the-fly, among many others."

bergie writes: "The new IDE for Midgard and PHP developers is entirely written in PHP using the PHP-GTK toolkit. PHPmole aims to provide the free software world with a web development environment comparable to DreamWeaver and MS Visual Studio, with additional content management functionalities. PHP is not only for web developers any more ..."

sanglin writes: "On O'Reilly's ONJava.com site, there's a new "Using SOAP with Tomcat" column from James Goodwill. It shows you how to create and deploy SOAP services with Apache's RPC model onto the Tomcat container."

d6y writes "Over on the O'Reilly weblogs there's an entry on the relationship between Sun's Java Community Process and Apache. Sun have been rubbing people up with wrong way (the problems of licensing open source J2EE containers; stuts v. JavaFaces; log4j v. JDK 1.4 logging....) and I hope this gets sorted out real soon. See also the original VNUNet article and Apache's position paper."

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Apache httpd project has released a new beta of their apache 2.0 server (v32)". For those who have not been following the 2.0 development, this is the third beta that has been produced. The new version of Apache sports the new APR API and a new method for filtered I/O, and has been rewritten to make use of a hybrid thread/process model. With Covalent already selling a commercial version of 2.0, hopefully we will see a full release of the open source version in the near future.

primetyme writes: "To address some of the concerns brought up in the first article about stopping email harvesting spambots with Apache, I've written a follow-up article that details even more methods to keep email-sucking bots off your Apache based site.
Stopping Spambots II - The Admin Strikes Back continues the epic saga that pits Spambot vs. Administrator."

BoarderPhreak writes: "Everything Solaris today posted a follow-up to the original 'Apache: The Basics' article entitled, 'Apache: Handling Traffic' which goes into detail about various methods of load-balancing and redundancy and mentions using Rsync for replication."

GeneOff writes: "Xerces 2.0 is out! You can get it here. This XML parser features full XML Schema conformance and partial support for DOM Level 3. The XNI (Xerces Native Interface,) is very cool. Xerces is arguably the most widely deployed Java based XML parser. Open source projects like those from Apache do a very good job of tracking upcoming standards like XML Schema (no more weird DTDs.) Kind of like Linux 2.5 and the USB 2.0 spec."

meheler writes "Looks like the Apache Group have released version 1.3.23 of their popular web server. Here's a link to the Official Announcement as well as where you can download it, and even view the ChangeLog."

lisam writes: "The Wiki plugin integrates nicely with Slash and has a lot of cool features, says Chromatic who introduces Wikis and gives a detailed explanation of how and why the Wiki plugin works in this OnLamp article. (chromatic is coauthor of O'Reilly's upcoming Running Weblogs with Slash.)" A lot of people just think of Slashdot style sites when thinking of the Slash codebase, but this article goes on about how to extend slash in cool ways. If you are interested in plugins, the repository is a good place to start.