In this issue

The LDAP authentication module for Apache 2.0 hosted at apache.org (as covered in a previous issue) has now been integrated into the "experimental" modules directory of the main 2.0 CVS repository, to be included in the next release. This module is a port of Dave Carrigan's auth_ldap code to the 2.0 API.

A long-standing limitation of the authentication and authorization modules in Apache is that a module which stores user information in a database, such as mod_auth_dbm, can only be used with the Basic authentication protocol, even though an implementation of the Digest authentication protocol is present (mod_auth_digest). A rewrite of the authentication and authorization modules is now under development; a vote took place on whether this work should be done under a version "2.1" of Apache, but the consensus was that it should be part of 2.0.

ApacheCon USA 2002 will be held in Las Vegas, USA on the 18-21 November 2002. The last ApacheCon conference was in April 2001 so there is bound to be plenty of new things to talk about. The location for this ApacheCon couldn't be better, being set just a couple of minutes walk from the famous Las Vegas strip.

The agenda for the conference was recently made available. The conference has some interesting new talks by a number of Apache experts and above all attending ApacheCon gives you the opportunity to meet the main players behind the Apache technologies.

Apache Week will be there to cover the festivities, as well as try to recover the US$30 we lost on the slot machines during our last Vegas conference. Find out more at the conference web site, or read our account of ApacheCon 2001 Santa Clara.

Slashdot reports on a new module, mod_haydn, designed to allow you to embed MSIL bytecodes into Apache. This gives developers the ability to access the whole Apache API from any CLR/.NET enabled language. Back in July we mentioned how Covalent had launched a module to provide integration of ASP.NET applications into the Apache server framework.

The Apache Axis team has announced a release candidate for Axis 1.0. Axis is an implementation of SOAP, providing a flexible, extensible Web Services framework for Java developers with a complete implementation of Sun's JAX-RPC and SAAJ specifications.

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

"Connecting middleware to Apache 2.0" talks about the Apache 2.0 filter API and shows you how to write an output filter that looks for a certain string and replaces it with the current time. It also describes the steps needed to build Apache 2.0 from source, build the full API docs, and implement output filters. Before it ends, it touches briefly on the structure of an Apache module and concludes that with the new API it is easier to write modules for Apache 2.0 than it was for Apache 1.3.

In the first installment of a new five-part series on Web applications entitled "The Art Of Software Development", the Developer Shed focuses on the first stage of the application development lifecycle. It covers the fundamental issues of analysing the customer's requirements and preparing the necessary documents for the customer to sign-off.

Brian Aker, Slashdot Senior Developer reviews two Open Source content management engines, Everything2 and LiveJournal in this article. His verdict is that while Everything2 is easier to setup and LiveJournal is easier to use, Everything2 wins overall because of its search engine.