What Is Apache?


In the beginning there was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Although the World Wide Web was first invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while he was at the then Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) in Switzerland, the Web could not become what it has without two practical additions: a server and a browser. The pioneers for both these applications were at NCSA at the University of Illinois.

A web server is nothing more than an application that runs silently in the background, listening for incoming requests from another computer for a particular document. After it receives a request, the server responds with the document, using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The NCSA developed the first popular server application, HTTPd, but eventually lost interest in the project. Development on HTTPd formally ended in 1998.

A group of users and developers continued to work on the open-source code for HTTPd, fixing bugs and adding features in a haphazard way. Things were formalized when Bob Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick set up a site where these HTTPd patches could all go. Before long (or so the legend goes), "a patchy server" got a formal name, Apache.

Marc Andreessen and others on the HTTPd team also worked on NCSA Mosaic, the first successful browser application. Andreessen went on to produce a commercial application that built on the Mosaic code, Netscape Navigator.

Over the years, Apache has become by far the most popular web server application. Netcraft has been monitoring server usage since October 1995, when HTTPd was still number 1. Apache has been the most popular server since October 1996 and has steadily increased its market share.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was incorporated in 1999 as the official guardians of the project. Today it has a board of directors elected annually by ASF members. It hosts two dozen web-related software projects that share the open-source Apache License.

The Apache 2.0 web server was released in 2002 and is included in your SUSE Linux disk. You can also download source code directly from the project website, http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi, and build it yourself.



SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed
SUSE Linux 10.0 Unleashed
ISBN: 0672327260
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 332

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net