Na maanden vertraging heeft de Apache Group woensdag de eerste public beta van Apache 2.0 gereleased. De release vond plaats op de eerste dag van de ApacheCon conferentie in Santa Clara. Versie 2.0 van de Apache webserver is grotendeels herschreven om de prestaties en schaalbaarheid te verhogen en om Apache beter geschikt te maken voor gebruik op non-Unix besturingssystemen zoals Windows. Aanvankelijk hoopten de Apache developers dat Apache 2.0 tegen eind 2000 final zou zijn, maar dat streven is bij lange na niet gehaald. Voor details over de public beta, die gelijk staat aan Apache release 2.0.16, kun je de aankondiging nalezen:
The Apache Group is proud to announce the release the sixteenth release of Apache 2.0. This is the first public beta of Apache 2.0. This release has been tested thoroughly, and has been running the apache.org web site for the last few weeks.
Apache 2.0 offers numerous enhancements, improvements and performance boosts over the 1.3 codebase. The most visible and noteworthy addition is the ability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any platform that supports both threads and processes. This has shown to improve the scalability of the Apache HTTPD server significantly in our early testing, on some versions of Unix. Apache 2.0 also includes support for filtered I/O. This allows modules to modify the output of other modules before it is sent to the client. Finally, we have included support for IPv6 on any platform that supports IPv6.
This version of Apache is known to work on many versions of Unix, BeOS, OS/2, and Windows. Because of many of the advancements in Apache 2.0, the initial release of Apache is expected to perform equally well on all supported platforms.
There are new snapshots of the Apache httpd source available every 6 hours from http://dev.apache.org/from-cvs/apache-2.0/ - please download and test if you feel brave. We don't guarantee anything except that it will take up disk space, but if you have the time and skills, please give it a spin on your platforms.
Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April of 1996. The May 2000 WWW server site survey by Netcraft (see: http://www.netcraft.co.uk/Survey/) found that more web servers were using Apache than any other software running on more than 60% of the Internet web servers. For more information, please check out http://www.apache.org/httpd.html.
Thanks Gert-Jan L. voor de tip.