In this issue

A quiet week saw discussion about whether the -X command-line argument should be brought back to Apache 2.0. Currently, to run Apache 2.0 in single-process mode, the following command must be used:

httpd -DONE_PROCESS

Many developers felt that the equivalent Apache 1.3 -X argument should be supported as well.

Debate about signal handling and server restarts has continued; two ideas for re-design are being developed, and some initial patches have been produced. Group members agreed that another 2.0 beta release should be delayed until restarts are working correctly, although some were urging for an alpha release in the meantime.

Changes which went in to the CVS repository this week include an update for TPF support in Apache 1.3 from David McCreedy, and several commits from Cliff Woolley fixing bugs in the APR buckets code.

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

eWEEK Labs' latest Web server benchmark tests show that Apache 1.3.19 running on Linux displayed a huge 2.5 factor speedup in just two years of development time.

In "Migrating from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.0", Ryan Bloom shares his experience of porting the apache.org web server to Apache 2.0 with O'Reilly ONLamp.com's readers. He gives some tips on which Multiprocessing Module (MPM) to use, implementing filters, and how to solve the problem of IPv6 support.

The final part of a three part Apache Web server tutorial describes the remaining directives of the main server configuration. It also covers the basics of setting up a few virtual hosts.

The Developer Shed presents "Using PHP With XML" part 1 and part 2 which focus on how to use PHP to convert your XML data into HTML. Users are assumed to be familiar with the basic rules of XML markup, and PHP scripting. Two methods of parsing XML data, SAX and DOM, are explained with simple examples to demonstrate how to use them in your own applications.