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I don't know about IBM but I doubt Sun feels fucked by the OSS community. There are several Open Source implementations of the J2EE platform or parts of it available and being developed. It's mostly that the Linux community is somewhat ignorant of them. Plus, of course they have more than 20 commercial companies developing implementations the J2EE platform, including IBM, which guarantees competition in the platform implementation and I doubt we will see in the same scale with the Microsoft platform.

For Open Source J2EE, check the following:
Jakarta
JBoss
Enhydra
Jetty
Resin

And why should anyone ally with Sun and Java? I've read their license and billj's justification for it. Why should anyone surrender their rights in this manner?

What does writing Java software or implementing Java API's have to do with Sun's community license?

There are plenty of Java implementations out there, both commercial and open source, that directly compete with .NET. Yet you never hear any of them mentioned in /. news. Seems the editors are to keen on spreading the .NET hype.

Jakarta
JBoss
Enhydra
BEA Weblogic
IBM WebSphere

• apache module
• web templating system

"I think Passport...should simply be an open standard," Perens said.

Why in the world would we want Microsoft's idiosyncratic authentication mechanism to become a defacto standard for web services directories? Certainly not because of any demonstrated technical superority of said "standard" -- the Passport service has been down for the last couple of days. Sorry, MSDN subscribers!

It seems that developers who are truly interested in standards should colloborate on creating an authentication interface for SOAP. Of course, the standard would support pluggable implementations, and if people want to provide a Passport implementation of the interface, that is their business.

I look forward to seeing Ximian's piece. Right now, my favorite implementations of the ".NET" technologies are as follows:

SOAP: Apache toolkit
WDSL: Alphaworks toolkit

Sun will have their own implementation as well, but it is still very early stage.

mod_perl? It's more advanced than anything I've done personally, but apparently mod_perl makes it pretty easy to embed Perl code into your Apache configuration files. I don't see why you couldn't use that mechanism to block a given user agent on a given day of the week, if that's what you really wanna do...

It's possible that the fix for your problem simply hasn't been QA'd enough to make it to the 0.9.2 release. I had a similar situation when I reported a bug with the Velocity Template Engine which I was using, which was causing me a lot of grief. Anxiously I waited, and a week later 1.2 was released. Unfortunately the fix to my bug was not in it because they hadn't had the time to properly test it.

Point is, I'm sticking with the nightlies (1.2-dev) until 1.3. I suspect you can do the same thing. I'd get you a link to my bug but the Apache Bug Database seems to be down right now.

Hmmm.. how do SmartTags stand when it comes to IP and copywrite? They are, in effect, taking the web page you have published and changing it (by adding the keyword sensitive links), and then displaying it to the end user.

Yes, it's like intercepting your local TV station's signal and inserting advertisements for your company, and then broadcasting it to the rest of the city. I'm pretty sure that is illegal. What they are essentially doing is stealing advertising space from your web page without compensating you. I think that there could be a lot of copyright issues here.

I wonder what happens if I make the word "Redhat" a link to www.redhat.com and the MS-default smart tags make the keyword "Redhat" into a link to Craig Mundie's anti-GPL/open source speeches? Which link wins out win you click on it?

What if I make an image a link to a web site? Maybe I have a "powered by Apache" logo that links back to www.apache.org. Will it parse the filename of the image looking for keywords and make my apache.png a link to the IIS web site? Will it parse my ALT tags for that link as well?

Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.

Basically, there are no good and easy solutions, but the article does give a few ways to go.

Basically, there are no good and easy solutions, but the article does give a few ways to go.

Can you imagine MS handling a security breach like apache.org ? They link to it from their home page, real OPEN Source Software :)

For all the web sites I've managed in my career, static page delivery has never been the chokepoint. Not even once. Even a sluggish web server can easily saturate a typical network connection serving just static content.

Besides, few web sites ever register that much traffic. Look at Apache's server status sometime. At the moment, it's pushing 1.2 MB/sec, and the CPU load isn't even close to the single digits.

As nifty and cool as Tux seems, I have a fear it wasn't created to solve real problems, but to win benchmarks.

I was thinking mod_speling might be a ready solution to this issue, but it might not work in the way I was hoping. This bug seems to come up during the parsing of access control settings (early in the request phase), whereas I think mod_speling comes in later, during the mapping of URLs to permitted filesystem points. I think. Nonetheless, even if it can't fix the problem out of the box, I think mod_speling could perhaps be adapted to this purpose if someone knew what they were doing. I'd take a shot myself, but my understanding of Apache's architecture is too weak to be of much value here, I think. Oh well.

A scripting language (such as UT's) is hardly a JavaVM as far as memory is concerned.

I'm not so sure you know what a JavaVM is then. In windows its a collection of dll's that bytecode runs on top of. This alone doesn't make it a memory hog. go to the Tomcat website. Tomcat is a very nice web app server running on a JavaVM with a memory footprint of around 10 megs when processing jsp's, servlets and serving content. And much less when sitting idle waiting for requests.
Of course UnrealScript doesn't run in a "Java"VM, but it does run in a virtual machine.
And your python example is nice, but way too stripped down to realistically use it for a VoIP app. Like the original post said, most of the necessary stuff was already in the existing Java API's.
With your embedded vm, you would be starting from scratch

Cross-platform, IDE that runs on Linux (and anywhere else Java runs), go with Java and Borland JBuilder. I've been using JBuilder 4 for some time, and 5 is out but I've not had a chance to try it. It's a free download. Also you could try Forte from Sun. It's pretty cool but you need a lot of horsepower to get the most benefit out of it.

Finally, learn to program without an IDE. Seriously. A text editor, a copy of the Ant Build Tool and you're good to go.

I am a web developer so, if you are interested, here are some good web development resources. First, try the World Wide Web consortium for a lot of good web and XML reference/background stuff. For using java on the web, check out Sun's Java Server Pages , with lots of tutorials. Sun is now using the FREE Apache Tomcat JSP Server . There is also a free jsp server in Allaire's JRUN Server 3.1. Interestingly, the JRUN Eval. Edition server has no expiration date, on purpose. Have fun!

There is a little-known feature in the Apache Webserver that quietly logs your IP address as you view pages from it.

According to http://www.bigbrotheraward.de/ (in German), the Apache Software Foundation actually received one of last year's Big Brother Awards.de for the Apache Web server logging IP addresses in default configuration.

There is a little-known feature in the Apache Webserver that quietly logs your IP address as you view pages from it.

According to http://www.bigbrotheraward.de/ (in German), the Apache Software Foundation actually received one of last year's Big Brother Awards.de for the Apache Web server logging IP addresses in default configuration.

Thank god, someone who gets it. The idea of most software providers is to give their customers access to a helpdesk (which usually isn't half as helpful as a tour through Usenet and/or IRC). Tha-tha-tha-that's all, folks! No way to drag a company like M$ to court and have a judge say they need to compensate you for your losses.

What about taking an insurance? It's always a nice idea to do that when you could get claims from customers, so that wouldn't change a lot. Maybe an insurance company could ask a higher fee if you work with Open Source (which they will think is of bad quality and prone to errors), but my bet is that you're still spending a whole lot less in this scenario. And let's face it, when was the first time proprietary software had a bug fixed sooner than any piece of Open Source software? So which software will be more suitable to run critical stuff in the end?

Suppose the same nasty bug is found in both IIS and Apache. It allows a hacker to break into the server and change the site. We all agree that this is very bad for businesses and if we're dealing with a co-hosting company, their customers will surely blame them if it happens. Now suppose a friend of mine and I both are co-hosters, he's running IIS, I'm running Apache. Guess who's going to be the first one to release a message stating that the bug has been fixed and the problem solved?

But suppose there's some quick hacker who hacks both our networks before any bugfix was released (no, I don't want the discussion again about what a hacker is, you all know exactly what I mean here, right? *grin*). The guys messes up a few sites and we both get huge claims from our customers. Now what will happen? Sure, I can't contact Apache and pass the claim to those people. But can my friend do that to M$? Don't think so. So, we're up to our necks in the same sh*t. Now suppose that one of us got himself a good insurance. The one who didn't, will be out of business before he can say bugfix while the other one simply forwards the claim(s) to his insurance company.

Now for the customers... The customers of our not-insured company suddenly lose their co-hoster and thus their websites! And the ironic part is, it's because of their own claims! Tough luck for both. The other one however, remains in business and can welcome some of the customers of the other one. I know I'd go for Open Source and an insurance!

SetEnv variable value
SetEnvIf attribute regex envar[=value] [..]

How you actually get the character encoding into this new variable is the proverbial exercise left to the reader, but I'm pretty confident that it could be done. In the worst case scenario, you'd have to write a new module for Apache, but it's possible that something like this already exists. Surely this isn't a rare problem when getting into I18N issues....

Because these two projects don't use the GPL to release their work. The Apache foundation uses the ASL which discourages forking in ways that wouldn't quite jive with adding in GPL code and OpenBSD uses the BSDLicense which allows code to be incorporated into non-free programs in ways that don't work with the GPL (though the FSF terms it as a compatable license these days). Basically, the differences aren't all that big of a deal unless you like picking fights with RMS. The little obscure differences between these different licenses are avaliable here if you actually had any interest in learning about these issues.

________________________

I've gone through this situation in several discussions for mid- and large-scale operations. Your answer will somewhat depend on how much money, time, and work you want to put into this system, with the usual tradeoff of ( more dollars ) = ( less ( time + effort ) ).

For a free solution, I've found that a sendmail-based solution works quite nicely on Solaris. We ran some internal mailservers with a combination of sendmail for smtp, qpopper for pop3, apache and php for web access, and ActiveState PerlMx for mail filtering. There are many passable imapd programs that would fulfill your IMAP requirement, among other things, cyrus imapd

Don't be fooled, though; this took some elbow grease, and a little tweaking with sendmail and qpopper (mostly for the remote-administration bit; you don't want all of your customers in /etc/passwd on your server!)

If you'd prefer to just lay down a little cash to get a working solution out the door, Openwave has a very reasonable email platform or two. It seems like it supports everything you're looking for, above.

Also, don't forget that Sendmail, Inc. creates some very sophisticated sendmail-based products; it looks like Advanced Message Server may have all of the solutions you're looking for.

Apache has run on Novell since 1.3.14. Too bad netcraft does not tell what version of Linux sourceforge is running.

As has been mentioned, Mandrakesofts donations page came about after numerous requests from the users. I for one am glad to see it -- I've used Mandrake since years ago, and until now I've never paid a cent for it. I love the distro and I would like some way to show it monetarily :-) But I wouldn't go out and by a boxed set because I wouldn't read the manual, I'd throw the box away, I wouldn't need support (if that's even included) and I know retailers probably make more than Mandrakesoft from these sales anyway.

Now the great thing about Mandrakesoft is that they hire lots of developers from many free software projects, like KDE, GNOME, PHP-Nuke, Plex86, Apache and many others. When you make a donation, you can mark those money for, say, KDE development. This way KDE will get better, KDE developers will eat, Mandrakesoft will save some dough and I can sleep at night.

In my opinion Mandrakesoft is heading in the right direction -- their way of income is a lot better than that of SuSE, which seeks to sell more boxes by making it extremely difficult to download their distro. And it's better than that of Red Hat, which charges for services such as automated software updates (which is included free with Mandrake).

Indeed, I think Mandrakesoft is discovering the future ideal way of making free software and still eat three meals a day. Their method is in many ways compliant with The Street Performer Protocol, in that users will pay up if and only if they actually like what they get.
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... users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 1.3.20 once it is released.

Here is the Release Announcement for 1.3.20

The relevant part of the changelog:

* A carefully constructed URI could cause the server to segfault on Win32 and OS/2, denying access to users until the error was cleared. This is resolved on both platforms, no server data vulnerability was identified for this denial of service exploit.

Well, the production server that runs on www.apache.org seems to have been supporting IPv6 for a long time.

According to this document.

Apache is now IPv6-capable. On systems where APR supports IPv6, Apache gets IPv6 listening sockets by default. Additionally, the Listen, NameVirtualHost, and directives support IPv6 numeric address strings (e.g., "Listen [fe80::1]:8080").
[Jeff Trawick]

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echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D7272 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc

I find it interesting that Mr Mundie suggests that there is yet to be a company with a succesful business model that releases most of their products under GPL or similar licence. There seems to me to be numerous companies that have such a business model, two that jump to mind particularly are RedHat and the Apache group.

You're missing two key points in the phrase "successful business". First, he said "successful", and according to their financial statement, RedHat is not. Second, he said "business", and I don't think he means not-for-profit corporations like The Apache Software Foundation.

Don't confuse having a business with having a good business model.

Apache's Slide project offers (well, eventually it will): Web based GUI, User management, Security, Locking, Versioning, Indexing, Searching, and more. It's based on a open protocol: WebDAV, so it should integrate (well, eventually it will) with other tools. See: http://jakarta.apache.org/slide/index.html

Alexandria, which says it is "a CVS/Javadoc/Source code/Documentation management system meant for use within Open Source projects. It's goal is to create a global documentation and source organization system to help people understand source code and to share code across projects."

A product from Borland call JDataStore, is a very high performance pure Java database system which has the particularity (in addtion to being a JDBC/SQL compliant DB) to also being able to store documents of any type directly into a built-in file system.

The examples that come with the distribution actually show you how to store and load files from it. You can then use an upload Servlet, and coouple that with a few JSP (Java Server Pages), and voila you got something which works anywhere.

Note that you will still need to program a way to keep older versions of documents, and a way to implement a locking mechanism for people to check out and check in files. I'm sure any competent programmer can accomplish all this in about a 2 weeks of work, and add another week for fine tuning and testing.

Note however that I assume that (1) storage space is not an issue, considering how cheap hard drives are these days, and (2) that you will not write any sophisticated mechanisms to store only the changes to a document, but rather that you will save ALL versions of all the documents, along with the choice to erase older versions (either with a fixed ptogramatically-fixed time variable, a user command, or both).

Please spare all the flames please, I KNOW there are commecial solutions, I KNOW this is a very simple solution, I'm JUST offering ONE possible solution to the poster's problem. Please spare all the "you can do this better with PHP or ASP, etc". Use the tools you want.

Note that I have already implemented systems which can do all this as outlined above, just not for the same problem domain, so I know what I'm talking about.

I hope this helps.

p.s.: You can use the free Tomcat Servlet/JSP engine to do this.

You're not comparing apples with apples here. You're comparing CGI with persistent interpreter. You can write CGI apps with VB and they'd be just as slow as Perl. On the other hand, you can use a persistent perl interpreter (mod_perl for Apache or PerlEx for IIS) and achieve speeds at least as fast as a VB dll. (OK, perl enthusiasts, I know mod_perl has benchmarked faster, but not so much as to be statistically significant)

This site, among many other large sites, can handle all its traffic quickly because of mod_perl.

-bp

Whatever WhitePaper you do find should be taken with a grain of salt. I will not be suprised if some very very "smart" marketing department put out a nice document claiming that their web development technology results in faster development, is more stable, performs better, better scalability, is fault tolerant, pleases the God of webpage etc....

ON a more serious note, I dont see why you dont have jsp/servlets in the list. Lots of cool technology there to help with rapid development. Seems strange to be that you are considering ASP's and not JSP's. Since the arguments against CGI might be correct for certain type of webpages. Check out the jakarta project on JSP's... tomcat is preeetyy awesome and lots of cool stuff available that can make things quiet easy to write. ALSO, IBM AlphaWorks has lots of Beans/etc. to make writing these pages pretty neat..... NOW if there was kick as TableBean we would be talking!

Do it all in Java, server-side, with three Apache tools - Xerces, Xalan, and Fop.

Generate your data in XML format, use XSL with Xalan to produce formatting objects which Fop can then turn into PDFs and deliver to the user. Reports exactly as you want them. That's the way we're doing it, anyway.

Do it all in Java, server-side, with three Apache tools - Xerces, Xalan, and Fop.

Generate your data in XML format, use XSL with Xalan to produce formatting objects which Fop can then turn into PDFs and deliver to the user. Reports exactly as you want them. That's the way we're doing it, anyway.

Do it all in Java, server-side, with three Apache tools - Xerces, Xalan, and Fop.

Generate your data in XML format, use XSL with Xalan to produce formatting objects which Fop can then turn into PDFs and deliver to the user. Reports exactly as you want them. That's the way we're doing it, anyway.

First of all, Crystal Reports sucks ;-) (had experience). Second. I developed a project very similar to what this guy is asking about. And in Java as well. Ipulled the data in XML and used XSL-FO project (see http://xml.apache.org/ to process it into PDF which is your best bet for online reports. It worked out prety well.

So Microsoft only dislikes the GPL... I guess that this piece of opensource software is acceptable....

XML is definitely the way to go. The XSLT stylesheets that you could generate can take you very far. Make sure you look into XSL:FO.

In particular, take a look at the XML Apache Project's FOP.

FOP, which is written in Java, will transform your XML data into PDF format.

I think you might want to think about accessing the data as XML and using XSL:FO as an output format. You can use Apache FOP to generate PDF's from XSL:FO documents. There's also a commercial offering that does the same thing, can't remember the name offhand though.

Cocoon has many of the features you describe. It doesn't have drag and drop report creation, you are on your own there. What it does provide, however, is a solid foundation for creating different views of a data set in different presentation languages. You can build a report from some input XML data as an HTML web page, or as a PDF document with line breaks, etc. It also encourages very clean implementation by total separation of content / logic and presentation code.

For a good overview of what Cocoon can do, including PDF output, check out my resume.

The only thing I know of that even comes close is FOP (XSL Formatting Objects Processor). FO is an XML-based formatting language that can be used to generate PDF files as well as printable output. You have complete control over page breaks and static content such as report headers and footers.

You will need to use Java (FOP is Java-based), and if the reports are generated on the client, you will need to download about 2.5MB of JAR files to the client for the required libraries. If you use Java servlets, you can generate the reports on the server and save on the size of the download and the processing needed at the client.

Obviously, anyone who runs AOLServer on NT has some issues they need to work out.

Hopefully, with help of therapy, he can stop scrubbing out penguins and start scrubbing out the real enemy... all those blasted AOL CDs in DVD cases that they keep mailing out. And maybe he'll install a real web server while he's at it. :)

Java did not really introduce any major innovations in programming language design, at least not anything that was not already present in many other programming languages. Java is actually C++ on a diet, which is also bytecode interpreted to provide what Sun thought would be platform-independence, but in reality it made very slow code. Try using the Java and C++ versions of the Xerces and Xalan XML and XSLT parsers available from the Apache XML project to do the same thing, such as convert even a small DocBook document into HTML with an appropriate set of XSL stylesheets. The difference is striking. (in my case, I have no choice, because there is no non-Java, Free [speech] XSL Formatting objects converter with functionality comparable to FOP, which is not only in Java but depends on the Java versions of Xerces and Xalan)

As for what one feature I'd like to see for new programming languages is CLEAN DESIGN. I like the way R^4RS Scheme document put it: "Programming languages should not be designed by piling feature on feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features seem necessary." It seems that most languages that have existed primarily as open source projects and even many standardized languages wind up doing precisely the opposite, piling features that seem necessary but could be better be served by extending what features are already there to make the features unnecessary. What I'd like to see is an object-oriented or imperative language that tries to emulate Scheme's philosophy: the attainment of perfection by finding the point where there is nothing more that can be taken away.

Apache can send Content-MD5 headers if told to and can act as a proxy server. It might be easy to hack something together...
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Apache can send Content-MD5 headers if told to and can act as a proxy server. It might be easy to hack something together...
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Apache can send Content-MD5 headers if told to and can act as a proxy server. It might be easy to hack something together...
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Ouch. That is a lot of $. I see that you are using Apache 1.3.12 on Linux. Have you considered downloading 1.3.19? Besides bug and security fixes, it is much faster.

I'm surprised more sites don't use mod_gzip (available through modules.apache.org. Most browsers currently in use can uncompress gzip'd content before rendering it. Since html compresses very well, unless your site is mostly graphics, mod_gzip can often reduce your overall bandwidth by 50% or more, at the cost of some cpu cycles.

Cocoon is much better at this. JSP's only invert content and presentation. JSP tags do separate them in someways but cocoon is much more powerfull.

apache jserv is now more or less handled by the mod_jk. the beauty of it all is that you can still have apache to do the usual stuff, and then use tomcat to handle JSP files. mod_jk looks at the request coming into the webserver, and if it qualifies (e.g. index.jsp), it will redirect the request to the tomcat running, independent of the apache server. AFAIK, that's what apache-jserv does. it's not great, but it makes everyone happy..

and no, it's quite alive and well.. and rewritten from scratch.

For information on tomcat, check out the tomcat site and an example of a default tomcat page.