In this issue

The biggest discussion this week concerned resource leaks in Apache 2.0. Dean Gaudet discovered in January that file descriptors opened during a request were not being closed until the connection was closed: since HTTP/1.1 keepalives may allow hundreds of requests per connection this is a resource leak. This has now been fixed.

A generally quiet week saw some exciting progress for secure server users, with Ben Laurie agreeing that mod_ssl should be used as the basis of SSL support in Apache 2.0. Ken Coar also announced the Call for Participation for ApacheCon Europe 2001, to be held in Dublin, Eire in October this year.

Roy Fielding has continued in his quest to clean up the build systems for APR and Apache 2.0, making two big checkins this week to ensure that any compiler flags specified by the user when running configure are passed through to the Makefiles.

In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that are of interest to Apache users.

Ryan Bloom kicks off a new series of columns about Apache 2.0 for O'Reilly Network readers with his first column - "Installing Apache 2.0". This piece proves to be merely a rehash of his previous Apache 2.0 articles except for a mention of mod_tls.

In "Linux for Newbies, part 22", Gene Wilburn stresses on the benefits of compiling Apache and any related modules by hand. Instructions are given for removing existing Apache and PHP from one's system before compiling them again from source. By doing this, users control how the packages are built and choose the locations for the various parts.

"PHP, Perl, Java servlets -- Which one's right for you?" covers how the three server-side scripting languages work and their differences. Anyone who is familiar with HTML will understand this article as the author intentionally avoids in-depth and technical details. At the end of the day, the decision is still up to the readers.