Category: Apache

ApacheCon: Closing Keynote

In his keynote address “New Ways of Thinking About Security: Open Source Thinking in a Bunged-up World”, Richard Thieme spoke about the contrast between linear thinking and network thinking in society. He posits that the Open Source movement represents a new kind of freedom and that chaotic and continually evolving. Thieme spoke about how members […]

ApacheCon: TAP and the Semantic Web

Rob McCool, continuing in the spirit of the easy to understand but never-adopted Meta Content Framework and the standard but substantially harder to grok Resource Description Framework, presented TAP. The overall problem is that there is a ton of data out there on the web, but it’s not in machine-understandable form. McCool is looking at […]

ApacheCon: Zend Engine 2 and PHP 5

Ze’ev Suraski began by giving a brief technical history of the PHP language. PHP 1 and 2 were developed around 1995. PHP 3, which started using lex/yacc more efficiently, was released in June 1998, execute while parsing. PHP 4 (May 2000) greatly improved performance (swtiched to a “compile first/execute later” paradigm, added reference counting) and […]

ApacheCon: Wednesday Afternoon

Lunch Sander, Jade, Zak, Shane and I headed off to the Mirage for their buffet lunch. Coversation included dead end jobs at dental labs, LindowsOS, differences between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, the conference scene, and handling traffic surges on websites (Fifa World Cup, 9/11, slashdot). After lunch, I had a drink with Randy Terbush. We […]

ApacheCon: Sun and Open Source

John Fowler, Sun’s Software CTO, spoke about Sun’s commitment to the Open Source movement. Nothing earth-shattering. Usual corporate pitch about how we love the O-S movement, and look how much wonderful stuff we’ve opened up. Java Community Process 2.5 sounds kinda interesting. What was more interesting was what Fowler didn’t say. I didn’t hear the […]

ApacheCon: Struts for MVC Web Apps

According to Craig McClanahan, writing a web application is more difficult than writing a traditional application for a couple of pretty simple reasons: HTTP is a stateless protocol, and applications need to maintain state Since the web is world-wide, applications are expected to be internationalized To complicate matters more, building any large scale application requires […]

ApacheCon: Audio and Apache

Sander van Zoest, formerly of MP3.com, gave a great introduction to serving audio via Apache and other servers. van Zoest described several different ways to deliver audio: HTTP downloading, HTTP streaming, Real Time Streaming Protocol (both on-demand streaming and live broadcast) and Windows Media Player’s MMS protocol. Since audio players seem to have pretty dumb […]

ApacheCon: Scalable Internet Architectures 2

High Availability and Load Balancing Theo challenged the audience to recognize the difference between replicateable data and non-replicateable data. Again the theme of the right tool for the job came up. Replicateable data needs marginal protection so you can use commodity hardware. Non-replicateable data needs single-point reliability, so you should consider “Enterprise” hardware. He then […]

ApacheCon: Scalable Internet Architectures 1

Theo and George Schlossnagle gave a 2 hour talk on a hodge-podge of a few topics for scaling large websites. I’ll split this into two blogs. Low-hanging fruit: Apache 1.3 optimizations First, George pointed out one of the easiest tricks to optimize a large website: turn KeepAlive Off. No surprise here; Yahoo! has been doing […]

ApacheCon: Waka: a replacement for HTTP

Ok, I was a little misguided when I wrote earlier that XML/I18N was off-topic for an Apache conference. While not about the Apache server itself, these technologies are in fact widely used in today’s environment of HTTP and Apache. But how about something completely different: a brand new protocol to replace HTTP? Whoa. (This is […]