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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

The web changed. We moved away from static HTML pages and CGI scripts to monolithic application servers in java, ruby, python, etc. Apache excelled with these static content sites and simple auth scenarios (remember .htaccess files?) but became painfully complex proxying application servers. Nginx was doing exactly what was needed at exactly the time it was needed.

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And yet interestingly, nginx started in 2002, which was still old-school internet. So really, it was ahead of its time.

2002 was the start of the glory days of java web monoliths, like big monstrosities with spring, Rails, Django, etc. came a couple years later and monolith app servers really started to take off.

Painfully complex proxying? Can you explain? I still use Apache as my go to HTTP server and proxying is just 2 config lines.

Around here, Apache was heavily used for its mod_php. It could run php embedded without complex fcgi setup.

Then everyone moved to ruby and python (and also perl) and mod_php stopped being an advantage.

Everyone moved to Ruby and Python? In your bubble perhaps, but PHP is probably more popular than Ruby and Python combined globally.

Definitely not everyone, and you might be right based on actual number of websites, but the zeitgeist definitely moved to Rails and Django for a while.

Somehow I still see .htaccess files in projects that aren't that old (and in a few cases never used Apache).

Yes - this would be my take as well.

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