Today is the 15th Anniversary of the Apache HTTP Server
blogs.apache.org
blogs.apache.org
I remember in the late 90s being excited to root Apache every month...Hats off to the Apache Software Foundation for such a great job.
Shakespeare: "Within the gentle closure of my breast, / From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;"
Samuel Johnson: "the place sacred to gladness of heart, from whence all fear and anxiety were irreversibly excluded."
Jane Austen: "Elizabeth was at no loss to understand from whence this deference for her authority proceeded."
Charles Dickens: "He began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine."
John Milton: "O, how unlike the place from whence they fell?"
William Wordsworth: "As Juno was unto the Theban blood, From whence to Thebes came griefs in multitude." (He's paraphrasing Chaucer here, but the "from whence" doesn't come from Chaucer.)
On the other hand:
PostOnce: "Whence means from where."
I think I'll go with Shakespeare, Johnson, Austen, Dickens, Milton, Wordsworth, and the Bible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today." :-)
†OED: (1) “From what place?”. (2) “gen. and transf. From what source, origin, or cause?” (3) “From which place; from or out of which.” (3b) “as compound relative: From the place in which, from where.” (4) “gen. and transf. From which source or origin (as a product); from which cause (as a result); from which fact or circumstance (as an inference).” (5) “as n. (nonce-use.) That from which something comes or arises; place of origin; source.”
I suppose it's barely possible that the meaning was simply "you don't have to include the 'from' when you're saying 'whence', so you could have saved yourself a bit of typing", but that seems improbable.
(Apologies if the question is naive or dumb)
So we still need feature-ful web servers (well at least I do).
Love you apache.
[Edited, per below]
+1 to the entire ASF.
Nobody saw the train coming.
When I was at Linuxcare, I had the static assets moved over to a different server with Boa, since the main Apache server had a massive mod_perl memory footprint. It speeded things up and freed up a lot of memory. And this was 10 years ago...
The Apache advantage has always been that it did (a lot) more than just spit out static files quickly. Perhaps nginx or something else will take its place, but it certainly won't be merely a question of event-based servers being faster with static files. We've known that for many years.
Yaws is neat, but it's kind of difficult to compare to Apache because it doesn't do as much in terms of some of the handy tools that Apache ships with, and at the same time it does more because you can write dynamic applications with it directly. Also, once again, I think it was released when Apache already was quite popular and widely used. Furthermore, the pool of people capable of hacking on C is orders of magnitude larger than that of Erlang hackers.
And when it comes down to it, Apache's way of doing things isn't that bad when you consider that it potentially has a lot of things loaded into it: those can fail occasionally without taking down the whole thing. And it's not as if Apache forks a new process for every request it receives.
Remember how much PHP crashes?