OStatic

Today marks the beginning of ApacheCon EU, the European conference for and about technologies sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). While I am not at the conference, I wanted to take the opportunity to post about the ASF and a number of the technologies that it has helped to create and promote. (You can watch live video feeds of conference talks, and see archives of previous talks, at the conference site.)

The ASF was incorporated in 1999, after it became clear that programmers working on the Apache HTTP server needed to formalize relationships, both with each other and with outside organizations. It has since grown to become an umbrella for a wide variety of open-source software projects, including many written in Java.

All software produced or sponsored by the ASF is distributed under the Apache License, which is similar in many ways to the BSD License. Unlike the BSD license, however, the Apache license has a section that protects against software patent abuse -- a section that makes the Apache license incompatible with versions 1 and 2 of the GNU Public License, despite the Free Software Foundation's strong opposition to software patents. GPL version 3, which was released about a year ago, has provisions that make it easier to combine software with the Apache license.

The most famous program produced by the ASF is the Apache HTTP server, which continues to be the most popular program for serving Web pages. Apache is particularly powerful because of its modular design, allowing users to mix and match functionality according to their needs. Apache might not be the fastest HTTP server, but it is probably the easiest to configure, and the easiest to integrate with a large number of Web frameworks and languages, including PHP.

It should thus come as no surprise that a large number of talks at the conference have to do with the Apache HTTP server: How to configure it, how to get more speed out of it, how to test sites built with it, and how to use the many modules that have been written for it, ranging from mod_rewrite (which allows for the complete rewriting of URLs) to mod_auth_kerb (for integrated Kerberos security).

The conference includes sessions on many other programs and frameworks, most or all of them having to do with Apache software. Some of these are informal "BOF" ("Birds of a Feather") sessions, such as one on the popular SpamAssassin system for finding and reducing e-mail spam. But there are formal sessions as well, covering technologies ranging from J2EE to Ajax to more obscure Apache projects such as "MINA," a framework that enables the easy creation of new network protocols.

In the coming days, I'll describe several ASF-sponsored projects that are interesting and useful, which offer practical functionality and a general promise of quality.

Meanwhile, what is your favorite Apache project?

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