Paul’s Journal

The last week has seen many new features and improvments made to httpd. Many of them have been accelerated by people at the ApacheCon EU Hackathon this week.

• mod_session

  On Friday Graham Leggett introduced a series of modules to support generation of sessions from HTTPD. Included is mod_session_crytpo, which encrypts the data using AES. This is the first time ‘form based’ authentication has had real support in the Apache Core.
  [docs: mod_session]
  [thread: Apache support for form authentication]
  

• mod_socache

  On Tuesday Joe Orton commited the new Small Object Cache modules, which have been under discussions for a couple months now. The mod_sslsession cache has been changed to use this. Currently suported cache backends are DBM, memcached, and Shared Memory. I expect many other modules will changed to use this cache API as time goes on.
  [svn: ap_socache.h]
  [thread: [PATCH] ap_socache.h & mod_socache_*]
  

• If/Else blocks added

  Nick Kew ported the expression parser from mod_includes, and has used this to add If and Else blocks to the core.This provides a viable alternative to mod_rewrite and RewriteCond, and letsyou set any modules configuration values.
  [docs: if]
  [thread: Dynamic configuration for the hackathon?]
  [commit: r644253]
  

• Turkish Documentation

  Nilgün Belma Bugüner contributed a complete translation of the Apache HTTP Server documentation in Turkish.
  [docs: Turkish]
  [thread: New Turkish Documents]
  [commit: r645667]
  

• Serf Bucket Discussions

  Discussion at the Hackathon covered how Serf Buckets use a “pull” method, for both input and output, unlike the current filter stack in httpd, which is Pull for input filters, but push for output filters. There was general agreement that the expieriment of mod_serf should be expanded up the filter stack.
  [svn: mod_serf.c]
  

• Simple MPM created

  Paul Querna started work on a new MPM at the Hackathon. The MPM hopes to run on both Unix and Win32 platforms, and keep the same behavoirs on both.
  [svn: SIMPLE.README]