crackhed writes "The Apache Server group has released Apache 1.3.17. Source and binaries are in all the usual places." Read the announcement or get the source.

onnerby writes: "Zend finally has released Zend cache. It looks like a great booster for commercial sites.
They also have released a IDE for PHP-delevopers."

Slashcode 2.0 ("Bender") is officially in beta. We now have themes, plugins, an abstacted database layer (MySQL support is beta, PostreSQL is alpha, so finally the rivalry can be settled ;) a journal system for users, a spiffy template language, better mod_perl usage, ways now for other languages to talk to our authentication layer, and oh so much more. Best of all, the code has been massively scrubbed and de-Taco-spaghettified(TM). You can find a copy on the ftp server. Hopefully the beta phase will be fairly short, as once its over, we'll get to move Slashdot, and have a clean codebase to which we can add all those features we've been wanting for so long. Thanks to Tofu, Krow, CowboyNeal, and Pudge for the toil. And good luck to everyone out there interested in poking at it: this version will give you much more joy then the last one *grin*

tf23 writes "ApacheToday's got an article about mod_perl and shared memory. The article is part IV of the improving mod_perl series. For any perl/apache coders (or anyone coding with Slash or Bender) this is a good read.
Quick links to the other parts:
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part III: Code Profiling and Memory Measurement Techniques
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part II: Benchmarking Applications
Improving mod_perl Driven Site's Performance -- Part I: Choosing Operating System and Hardware"
This is in part one of our holy grails, caching all of the comments for current stories. It would make those near 2000 comment stories a lot easier to stomach for the Web servers.

ApacheCon has announced who the keynote speakers for the April convention in Santa Clara will be. John 'maddog' Hall will be speaking along with David Brin (one of my favorite authors). No announcements yet for sessions, but hopefully we will see that sometime soon.

hhg writes: "Central Command discovers First Virus to Use PHP Scripting Language. 'This virus is not dangerous in any kind, but it can be modified to have a very destructive payload and marks a new step towards a new virus generation,' said Steven Sundermeier, Product Manager at Central Command, Inc." In its current form, the virus apparently only infects Windows machines -- by infecting all .php, .hm, .html or .htt files in the C:\Windows directory, but I guess we will see more dangerous variants out there very soon." The Register also has a nice article about it here. Anyone who has been following PHP probably already knows about this, but I thought it would be interesting to folks who don't follow PHP that closely. Calling it a virus though, is somewhat suspect. Plus we get to show off the new PHP topic icon :)

Digimax writes "A sometimes more interesting read than the netcraft survey is the one carried out monthly by Security Space. It has a breakdown of apache module usage as well as some other interesting stats that the Netcraft survey does not produce."

Well, the battle between Apache and IIS continues with Apache gaining ground this month - but a pretty small amount of gain. What I found most interesting was the Linux distribution discussion and the possible implications that will have in the long run. There's also some interesting discussion about the walmart.com domain, which has been submitted before.

nadachicken asks: "Has anyone found a module/solution to pull Apache configs from a database server? Currently I have a program that writes the flat file configs from the database but this seems like a waste of time if Apache could be rigged to pull the same info directly. I thought I had stumbled upon code to do this a while back, but I can't seem to find it again. If there is not such a package out there, any guess on how easy it would be to pull off?"

Eric Sun writes: "Apache 2.0 is now one step closer to reality. Alpha 9 is now available for download at the Apache download page. You can also read the changelog here." On a side note, they are hoping this is going to be their last alpha, and that they will be releasing a beta next month.

If you have been interested in learning how to install and configure mod_ssl, you might want to take a look at Rich Bowen's article on ApacheToday which gives an overview on how to do this.

djoyce101 writes: "I run a public message board based on Infopop Ultimate Bulletin Board. The BBS has now grown to over 4300 members with nearly 3,000,000 requests per month. The dynamically generated pages are growing in size everyday, but my available bandwidth is not. My question is this: Is there any way to make Apache compress everything in realtime? (as long as the client supports gzip content) The server is averaging about 300MB per day, all of which can be compressed to about 50MB. I've found PHP scripts that can do this, but the BBS is all perl. Does anyone know of a way to get this done?"
You might look at mod_gzip. There are also some mod_perl compression modules which might help you out.

I got a piece of email today from Sascha Schumann about the issue of installing mod_perl and PHP together. In his own words: "The problem was caused by mixing object code with and without Large File Support (LFS) in one process. APXS provides a lot of unnecessary information. PHP applied a strict filter to get only useful things. That filter missed settings for LFS, so that PHP was always compiled without LFS." If you are having issues with this, you can check out the latest snapshot here, which is patched to solve this problem. The fix will also be a part of version 4.0.4 when it is released.

Sure, you know that Netcraft tests have for a while provided empirical evidence of Apache's usefulness and ubiquity. But if you're called upon to use Apache in your workplace (or if you care to serve pages for fun off your home box), you might need more to go on. Chromatic took some busy time out of his life to write this review of Administering Apache, which he says takes a "calculated, strategic approach" to what has become one of the world's most important pieces of software.

B.K. DeLong writes: "Batik is a Java-based toolkit for applications that want to use images in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format for various purposes, such as viewing, generation or manipulation. http://xml.apache.org/batik/"

jonstevens writes " We hereby announce the availability of the final release of version 3.2 of the Tomcat servlet container and JSP engine. Tomcat implements the Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 specifications, and represents the most current release quality build of this project. Compared to version 3.1, there have been substantial improvements in performance, many new features (including support for SSL connections), and well over 100 bug fixes. Pick up the binary distribution at http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/tomcat/release/v3 .2/bin/"

ApacheCon 2001 has made a call for papers for the next conference in San Clara. So this is your chance to drag out all those goofy Apache tricks that are sure to amaze audiences.

Paul K Egell-Johnsen writes "At zez.org Bård Farstad has written an article on how to embed java in php.

I saw a sample of mixing Perl and Java at the O'Reilly Open Souce conference a couple of years ago. It was some of the ugliest code I have ever seen.

anubis__ asks: "It appears that Microsoft has an XSL ISAPI filter available for IIS. This enables you to, among other things, serve up a different XSL stylesheet depending on the client device. Something like this will become invaluable with the growing mobile phone/PDA browser market. Is there a module available (or in progress) for Apache that does something similiar with XML? I know it can be done with SSI and PHP."

This has been submitted to slashcode a couple of times now. It has appeared on the Slash mailing lists and from talking to Bryan at ApacheToolbox he has noticed it too. When compiling mod_perl and PHP 4 together, you end up with a core file for an Apache process. Is there a solution for making the two of them play nicely together?