Slashdot Mirror

Sheik Yerboutii asks: "The recent downtime caused by the Code Red and NIMDA worms has prompted my Manager to start considering moving away from IIS to Apache. I've been tasked with finding out just how difficult it will be to move to the new webserver. I've got to find out things like how to install and configure it (relatively easy, it's all documented at www.apache.org) but also, things like what do we de now that we've been working in VBScript ASP for about 6 moths?" We posted a similar question to this one, just over a year ago. Any changes or additions to the advice given in that discussion?

"I've read that Apache::ASP exists and that's got something to do with mod_perl but now I'm going in circles figuring out how to make this thing work. I also can't find straight answers on things like if we make the cut over, will we have to convert the VBScript ASP to Perl ASP?

Can anyone relay their experiences with cutting from IIS to Apache? Running ASP with Apache? Most importantly, what are the best resources available for Apache administrators? (hopefully something with a discussion forum)"

A reader writes "The latest version of the Apache Java Servlet engine has been released. 'The 4.0 release implements the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications.' Read more at The Apache Group's Jakarta site."

Water Paradox writes: "A couple of years ago our company was firmly entrenched in the Microsoft way of doing business. All of our development was in Visual Basic and related proprietary tools. Open Source / Free Software advocates were a minority. Last week we made the switch from VB to Open Source development (Apache, PHP, my SQL, etc) on a Win32 box. This decision was made quickly, but came after eight months of evaluation. I wrote a short article about it here: Moving from Microsoft to Open Source, which may be useful to other folks contemplating the same switch. Yes, we're even proposing Win32 Apache as our default server, since it has been reasonably stable for us over eight months."

snotty writes "A well written article by Ganesh Prasad over at linuxtoday arguing that the shift towards web services has reduced the attractiveness of the current generation of Open Source web products. He talks about the market share decrease in Apache. Also mentions how .NET, Microsoft, Sun, Java, and Open Source Software fit into the picture." I think that the decrease in Apache's share is a red herring, but the bigger picture of web services is a troubling one.

osi writes "The Avalon team is proud to A HREF="http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/">announce the 4.0 final release of the Avalon Framework. The Avalon project is Apache's Java Server Framework. It is separated into six sub projects: Framework, Excalibur, LogKit, Cornerstone, Phoenix, and Testlet. Its purpose is to simplify server side programming for Java based projects. It formalizes serveral best of breed practices and patterns for server side programming."

ChangeLog for Avalon Framework 4.0

• Added new method to Component Manager and Selector for discovering if a Component exists inside or not. Also augmented the default versions with the basic implementation to discover them. [BL]
• Added stylesheet to convert Stylebook markup to DocBook markup. [BL]
• Changed the documentation build process to use Cocoon to build the site. [BL]
• Added new "Developing with Avalon" book in DocBook format. [BL]
• Added Executable interface to activity package. [PD]
• Updated Resolvable interface to allow a ContextException to be thrown on failure. [PD]
• Add a makeReadOnly() method to the default implementations of Configuration, Context and ComponentManager. Calling this method after the respective object has been filled will make the object read-only. This is a safety precaution to stop code performing unwanted operations. [PD]
• Updated the javadocs of many of the classes. [PD]
• Update documentation so that it is more accurate and descriptive. [BL]

Downloads for Avalon Framework 4.0 available at http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-avalon/re lease/framework/latest

cgu queries: "For those who are familiar with it, log4j is one of the most widely used Java libraries today. Sun Microsystems intends to ship an obviously inferior package with JDK 1.4. Is the Java Community Process just a fig leaf allowing Sun to ignore existing development efforts? What has been the experience of other Java developers with the JCP?" There's a bit of history here, so you'll probably want to check out the log4j pages linked to, above. This is a large concern for any language which has developed a community around it, who hopes to assist in its further development. So is Sun paying attention to the community that has rallied around Java or is the Java Community Process just paying lipservice to the intended ideal?

cgu queries: "For those who are familiar with it, log4j is one of the most widely used Java libraries today. Sun Microsystems intends to ship an obviously inferior package with JDK 1.4. Is the Java Community Process just a fig leaf allowing Sun to ignore existing development efforts? What has been the experience of other Java developers with the JCP?" There's a bit of history here, so you'll probably want to check out the log4j pages linked to, above. This is a large concern for any language which has developed a community around it, who hopes to assist in its further development. So is Sun paying attention to the community that has rallied around Java or is the Java Community Process just paying lipservice to the intended ideal?

cgu queries: "For those who are familiar with it, log4j is one of the most widely used Java libraries today. Sun Microsystems intends to ship an obviously inferior package with JDK 1.4. Is the Java Community Process just a fig leaf allowing Sun to ignore existing development efforts? What has been the experience of other Java developers with the JCP?" There's a bit of history here, so you'll probably want to check out the log4j pages linked to, above. This is a large concern for any language which has developed a community around it, who hopes to assist in its further development. So is Sun paying attention to the community that has rallied around Java or is the Java Community Process just paying lipservice to the intended ideal?

mvw inputs: "These days the large JavaOne conference is taking place. The commercial and proprietary vendors will be well represented there. In addition I would love to see a discussion here, on the state of Java affairs from the open source crowd. Java is a bit special, in that it does not only represent a programming language but establishes a kind of operating system as well ('Java the platform'). And indeed this world is not fully closed there is also open source software blossoming there, ranging from the GPL to the BSD sides of the free/open source community. The Jakarta Project initiative is going the BSD license way (actually they use ASL, but it is quite close), with prominent software like Tomcat or ant. Less mentioned in the Java press IMHO is the GNU Project which working on a GPLed Java implementation, with a long list of Java programs. They even have a couple of quines in Java here."

mvw inputs: "These days the large JavaOne conference is taking place. The commercial and proprietary vendors will be well represented there. In addition I would love to see a discussion here, on the state of Java affairs from the open source crowd. Java is a bit special, in that it does not only represent a programming language but establishes a kind of operating system as well ('Java the platform'). And indeed this world is not fully closed there is also open source software blossoming there, ranging from the GPL to the BSD sides of the free/open source community. The Jakarta Project initiative is going the BSD license way (actually they use ASL, but it is quite close), with prominent software like Tomcat or ant. Less mentioned in the Java press IMHO is the GNU Project which working on a GPLed Java implementation, with a long list of Java programs. They even have a couple of quines in Java here."

mvw inputs: "These days the large JavaOne conference is taking place. The commercial and proprietary vendors will be well represented there. In addition I would love to see a discussion here, on the state of Java affairs from the open source crowd. Java is a bit special, in that it does not only represent a programming language but establishes a kind of operating system as well ('Java the platform'). And indeed this world is not fully closed there is also open source software blossoming there, ranging from the GPL to the BSD sides of the free/open source community. The Jakarta Project initiative is going the BSD license way (actually they use ASL, but it is quite close), with prominent software like Tomcat or ant. Less mentioned in the Java press IMHO is the GNU Project which working on a GPLed Java implementation, with a long list of Java programs. They even have a couple of quines in Java here."

mvw inputs: "These days the large JavaOne conference is taking place. The commercial and proprietary vendors will be well represented there. In addition I would love to see a discussion here, on the state of Java affairs from the open source crowd. Java is a bit special, in that it does not only represent a programming language but establishes a kind of operating system as well ('Java the platform'). And indeed this world is not fully closed there is also open source software blossoming there, ranging from the GPL to the BSD sides of the free/open source community. The Jakarta Project initiative is going the BSD license way (actually they use ASL, but it is quite close), with prominent software like Tomcat or ant. Less mentioned in the Java press IMHO is the GNU Project which working on a GPLed Java implementation, with a long list of Java programs. They even have a couple of quines in Java here."

sammoth writes: "themes.org was hacked [CT:Cracked] and replaced with a rather vulgar logo. The intruder makes some bold statements about the security, or lack there of, on several sites. " Of course I'm still in Tokyo right now, so your guess about what's happening is just as good as mine. And 5000ms ping times to the U.S. East Coast sure makes posting this story tricky ;) Apparently the cracker managed to get into SourceForge and Apache.org too ... and he posted user accounts and passwords on t.o along with a rant that I haven't seen. Update: 05/31 02:40 PM by T : Here's an informative explanation on apache.org of the break-in on that site.

dthor writes "An exploit was discovered that allows a malicious user to terminate the Apache server 1.3.x running on Win32 or OS2. Apache has released a patch. 'Users of older versions of Apache on Win32 and OS2 platforms are cautioned to to upgrade to 1.3.19 and apply this fix. All Win32 and OS2 users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 1.3.20 once it is released.'"

WaldoJ asks: "I recently acquired an old Dell P133. So I fixed it up, and now it's got 32MB of RAM and 1.6GB of storage, running Linux and, as of these evening, it's running Sendmail, Apache and Mailman. I've got it plugged in with the rest of my servers, and I intend for this little system to serve as a free mailing list server for local organizations. Technically-speaking, everything is covered. But I can't help but wonder what sort of practical problems that I'll run into, like teaching folks how to administer a list on Mailman, understand what good a mailing list is, obeying mailing list etiquette, etc. Has anybody set up a community mail server like this? I'd like to avoid running into known, documented problems. OTOH, if this hasn't been done, I want to make sure to keep careful notes so that others can set up something similar with a minimum of hassle."

Great news from the Apache Conference. A new version of Apache 2.0 has been released as a beta. You can find more information in their announcement. In other news according to Roy Fieldling's talk on the state of Apache, as of their next fiscal year individuals should be able to make tax deductible contributions to the Apache Foundation.

Great news from the Apache Conference. A new version of Apache 2.0 has been released as a beta. You can find more information in their announcement. In other news according to Roy Fieldling's talk on the state of Apache, as of their next fiscal year individuals should be able to make tax deductible contributions to the Apache Foundation.

Great news from the Apache Conference. A new version of Apache 2.0 has been released as a beta. You can find more information in their announcement. In other news according to Roy Fieldling's talk on the state of Apache, as of their next fiscal year individuals should be able to make tax deductible contributions to the Apache Foundation.

Geir Magnusson Jr. writes "The Velocity project is pleased to announce the release of Version 1.0 beta 1 of the Velocity template engine. Velocity is a powerful template engine written in Java and released as open source software under the Apache Software License. Ideal for web development, it's a great alternative to JSP, ASP, PHP and other dynamic server-side web technologies. For more information, including the v1.0 beta 1 release of Velocity, please visit the Velocity home page."

The Open Source Initiative has modified their official definition of an open source software license. The change itself is minor, but they're also calling for more input on other possible improvements to the definition - see below for more.

Russ Nelson writes: "We changed the Open Source Definition today. Some people had the idea that "may not" in Section 1 meant that they had a choice. We changed it to "shall not". Other changes may be in the offing. The OSD says nothing about use licenses or patents, for example.

"A use license is largely unenforcable by itself. How can you tell what people are doing with software if anyone is allowed to redistribute it to anyone they want? Some parties have tried to enforce a use license by requiring the non-removal of certain parts of the code. This is, in itself, already prohibited by the OSD, however it's best not to rely on indirection to keep use licenses off Open Source software.

"Patents are a problem that have been anticipated by some licensors. In part the furor over the APSL 1.0 was produced because they reserved the right to revoke the license if it turned out that they were licensing software patented by someone else. A number of new licenses have specifically included terms that require contributors to license any applicable patents. And yet the OSD does not require this. What is the good of an OSI Certified piece of Open Source unless you can use it? And you certainly shouldn't allow someone to sue any contributor over patent infringement and still have a license to use the software.

"Are there other lapses in the Open Source Definition? Send them to me and I'll summarize for the board. Speaking of the board, Brian Behlendorf (Apache/Collab) and Ian Murdock (he put the ian in Debian/Progeny) have resigned, and Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) and Michael Tiemann (co-founder of Cygnus) have taken their place."

manichawk writes "Apache 1.3.19 was released yesterday (so by today the mirrors should have been updated). It's another bugfix release, largely for the Win9x/2k versions, but a few security holes have been plugged too. Check out the changelog for more details, or just download it..."

manichawk writes "Apache 1.3.19 was released yesterday (so by today the mirrors should have been updated). It's another bugfix release, largely for the Win9x/2k versions, but a few security holes have been plugged too. Check out the changelog for more details, or just download it..."

manichawk writes "Apache 1.3.19 was released yesterday (so by today the mirrors should have been updated). It's another bugfix release, largely for the Win9x/2k versions, but a few security holes have been plugged too. Check out the changelog for more details, or just download it..."

David N. Welton writes " The Apache Software Foundation today announced the launch of the Apache Tcl project, with the goal of promoting the integration of the Apache Web server with the Tcl scripting language.
Tcl (tool command language, pronounced "tickle") is an open-source, cross-platform scripting language Tcl has a strong history of use for the Web, with products such as AOLserver, and the widely used StoryServer. Combined with Apache, the world's most popular web server, Tcl will make an excellent companion for back-end scripting tasks.
tcl.apache.org will serve as a point of reference for Apache-Tcl efforts, initially hosting the mod_dtcl project, a fast and light implementation of Tcl for Apache."

David N. Welton writes " The Apache Software Foundation today announced the launch of the Apache Tcl project, with the goal of promoting the integration of the Apache Web server with the Tcl scripting language.
Tcl (tool command language, pronounced "tickle") is an open-source, cross-platform scripting language Tcl has a strong history of use for the Web, with products such as AOLserver, and the widely used StoryServer. Combined with Apache, the world's most popular web server, Tcl will make an excellent companion for back-end scripting tasks.
tcl.apache.org will serve as a point of reference for Apache-Tcl efforts, initially hosting the mod_dtcl project, a fast and light implementation of Tcl for Apache."

David N. Welton writes " The Apache Software Foundation today announced the launch of the Apache Tcl project, with the goal of promoting the integration of the Apache Web server with the Tcl scripting language.
Tcl (tool command language, pronounced "tickle") is an open-source, cross-platform scripting language Tcl has a strong history of use for the Web, with products such as AOLserver, and the widely used StoryServer. Combined with Apache, the world's most popular web server, Tcl will make an excellent companion for back-end scripting tasks.
tcl.apache.org will serve as a point of reference for Apache-Tcl efforts, initially hosting the mod_dtcl project, a fast and light implementation of Tcl for Apache."

crackhed writes "The Apache Server group has released Apache 1.3.17. Source and binaries are in all the usual places." Read the announcement or get the source.

crackhed writes "The Apache Server group has released Apache 1.3.17. Source and binaries are in all the usual places." Read the announcement or get the source.

Eric Sun writes: "Apache 2.0 is now one step closer to reality. Alpha 9 is now available for download at the Apache download page. You can also read the changelog here." On a side note, they are hoping this is going to be their last alpha, and that they will be releasing a beta next month.

Eric Sun writes: "Apache 2.0 is now one step closer to reality. Alpha 9 is now available for download at the Apache download page. You can also read the changelog here." On a side note, they are hoping this is going to be their last alpha, and that they will be releasing a beta next month.

B.K. DeLong writes: "Batik is a Java-based toolkit for applications that want to use images in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format for various purposes, such as viewing, generation or manipulation. http://xml.apache.org/batik/"

jonstevens writes " We hereby announce the availability of the final release of version 3.2 of the Tomcat servlet container and JSP engine. Tomcat implements the Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 specifications, and represents the most current release quality build of this project. Compared to version 3.1, there have been substantial improvements in performance, many new features (including support for SSL connections), and well over 100 bug fixes. Pick up the binary distribution at http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/tomcat/release/v3 .2/bin/"

jonstevens writes " We hereby announce the availability of the final release of version 3.2 of the Tomcat servlet container and JSP engine. Tomcat implements the Servlet 2.2 and JSP 1.1 specifications, and represents the most current release quality build of this project. Compared to version 3.1, there have been substantial improvements in performance, many new features (including support for SSL connections), and well over 100 bug fixes. Pick up the binary distribution at http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/tomcat/release/v3 .2/bin/"

Snowdog asks: "How can a non-profit organization compete when hiring programming talent? I work for a well-established project doing research into Internet technologies at a major university, and we've had a very tough time hiring full-time programmers. We have a great atmosphere, good benefits, and are doing some interesting work, but just can't match the high salaries being paid by companies in the private sector for programmers who know their way around the Internet. How are other non-profit groups dealing with this? Is there a way to adapt techniques used by successful Open Source projects to attract talented full-time programmers? The whole issue is further compounded because, like almost all non-profit groups, we can't go through recruiters, so it's difficult to even get the attention of software engineers, many of whom are hounded by headhunters so often they don't bother at all to scan through the Help Wanted ads." We've discussed this problem from the other direction, but is there a place online where needy organizations and programmers with free time on their hands to get together to solve problems?

[JEB] writes "Yet another apache alpha has been released: the changelog even shows that mod_proxy is almost working. Get it here."

[JEB] writes "Yet another apache alpha has been released: the changelog even shows that mod_proxy is almost working. Get it here."

[JEB] writes "Yet another apache alpha has been released: the changelog even shows that mod_proxy is almost working. Get it here."

Until this week, I've been unconvinced by those who say the U.S. election process needs to be conducted with computers instead of paper, pencil, and punchcards. I've changed my mind. It's time to take a good hard look at our ancient voting system, and bring it up to date. When today's 14-year-olds go to vote in the 2004 elections, will they still take the pencil from the volunteer, slide the punchcard into the molded plastic, and turn the weird knobs? Or will they use the technology they've grown up with?

My change of heart came while listening to an NPR story last night. Election results for one county in Michigan were held up for two hours because some volunteers with ballots were barricaded in the building by a bear. A bear! What century is this?

There are some fair concerns about moving to a more-than-just-dead-trees voting system. We have to consider what the impact will be on voter enfranchisement. A change that makes it possible for the rich to vote by telepathy, for example, while the poor have to drive a hundred miles uphill both ways (to access a non-telepathic voting booth) would not be exactly democratic.

Would it have been fair, in 2000, for the middle class to be able to vote from the comfort of their homes and jobs, while the poor and homeless had to get to a voting booth? I don't know.

But my best guess is that, by 2004, this won't be a question anymore. Plot the percentage of lower-income homes with internet access from 1996 to 2000, and then extrapolate another four years. So if it should be done, how can it be done? There are five key issues to solve: authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security.

I propose a system in which each voting booth runs a webserver which logs votes (without identification) to two internal media (hard disk and floppy would be good, see below). Once the polls close, each booth's computer can be totalled and sent over the internet to the state's central server.

Meanwhile, any computer that speaks https on the internet would become a voting booth of its own, running slightly different software.

Each state's official results could be in an hour after its polls close. Which beats the ten-day waiting period we have now for our overseas ballots.

Authorization isn't really that hard: When you register to vote, you (by default) get a password delivered by snail-mail a week before the election. Tampering with that mail is a federal offense, of course. On election day you use secure http to sign in from anywhere with your name, address and password. Lose the password? Sorry, you don't get the comfort of home/work; you go to the voting booth with everyone else.

Anonymity is trivial; any logs with identifying information either don't get stored, or get wiped immediately.

Computers crash. Data confidence means the servers write the votes to multiple media: network, hard drive, flash RAM. A dot-matrix printer makes a good emergency backup medium.

This system also needs a dirt-simple GUI for voters connecting from home or work. No butterfly webpages necessary; click a name, and get a confirmation screen that shows you name, party, (importantly) photo, and big "yes" and "no" buttons.

At the voting booth it can be even simpler, using touch-screens.

Security is, of course, always a problem. Secure http effectively eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack, so the main worry are that an attacker will be able to run unauthorized code on a government computer which could (read) correlate my name with my vote or (write) change my vote. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a completely open-sourced system, from the kernel up, combined with clean-room installations at a secure location, can make these concerns minor by comparison to existing vote-fraud concerns.

(My vote would go to OpenBSD, Apache, and Mozilla, though of course good luck predicting what will be best four years from now.)

Also, net admins overseeing the effort need to have enough access to track and lock out attackers, but obviously they can't have access to change the election results. Lock them in a room for the day with a hundred video cameras tracking everything they do, like the officers on missile-launch duty. Many net admins will find this a relaxed and enjoyable work environment compared to their current jobs.

There are many problems that have to be solved -- please bring up the ones I haven't mentioned here, let's start the debate! My hunch is that they can be solved. And the overriding question must be, will it be an improvement over the current system?

Given that Florida's election is being decided by a 400-vote difference, with 19,000 botched votes thrown out, I'd say the impossibility of clicking on two presidential choices at the same time makes this system a huge win.

The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States. How much worse could a digital system really be? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know what century it is, and the time for Little House on the Prairie nonsense is over. Let's make this happen for 2004.

I'll give my last word to Andre Uratsuka Manoel, a partner at the internet firm Insite, in Brazil. (Props to TBTF for putting Andre and me in touch.)

Brazil has a 100% electronic election. On election day I go my "electoral section," identify myself, sign my name. The "section president" then types in my code and I walk to the booth which is in a corner of the room where no one can see my vote. I then type the number of my candidate, see his/her photo and press "confirm."

The voting machines store the votes in at least three different places: a floppy disk (which is locked), a flash card and the internal hard disk. There are written procedures for any kind of failure I could think of and back-up machines readily available. Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.

The results are proclamed extremely fast. On the mayoral run-off elections that happened 2 weeks ago, results were out 2 hours after the election in the city I live in (Sao Paulo, with about 6 million voters) and 6 hours after it in the last city in which there was a run-off. In my home city the results came out a little after the election sites closed and the result was proclamed with the winner having 40 thousand votes more than the second place (0.4% of 1 million votes).

In the first round of elections in Sao Paulo, the third place contestant lost the ticket for the run-off elections by less than 0.1%. The one who lost didn't even think of contesting the results because no one thought there were any kind of frauds.

In the first round, 100 million voters (about the same as the active voters in US) in 5 thousand cities chose their mayors and councelors. All the results were proclaimed 30 hours after the voting closed.

This happens in a country that has a much lower level of literacy, technology-savvy and of money as the U.S. Remember that some mayors were chosen in places hours away from anyplace else (even by plane), i.e. in the middle of the rain forest. Those places don't have electricity.

Of course there were complaints, but not because of the electoral process. Mostly they were due to campaigning on the election day, voter transportation and coercion.

(Updates: Dave Riesz mentioned Riverside County, California, which has an electronic voting system already in place. Their 2000 primary turnout was the highest in 20 years, which may or may not mean anything. That led me to the California Internet Voting Task Force which looks interesting. Don Wegeng pointed me to RISKS thoughts by Douglas Jones. Brian Dunbar points out "Hurrah for Slow Recounts" by the always-interesting Ellen Ullman.

Lee Coursey passes along Elizabeth Ferrill's Discussion of Electronic Voting. James McCann, a programmer at VoteHere.net, says my description is "not terribly far off but very incomplete" -- I'll take that as a compliment -- check out his site and SecurePoll.com too. And finally, a story in Salon that makes my point better than I could: "Confessions of a Florida Poll Worker."

If you have more links or information, emailme.)

Ragetech asks: "I've been given the seemingly impossible task of finding a way to do automated publishing to the Web for primarily technical documentation. The task doesn't sound so bad, until you start looking the constraints and emphasize the need for a _inexpensive_ solution. I've looked at many different vendors but all of the ideal solutions seem to have price tags around $100k and above. They don't seem to be targeting small- or medium-sized businesses at all, and $100k is way outside my price range. So what are people using out there to do this type of thing? I want to enable our users to publish technical documents/manuals to the Web, preferably with some sort of structure (like, say, the DocBook DTD) so they can concentrate on creating/updating/keeping alive content. What do people use?"

"Here's the gist of what I'm looking for:

1. Complete solution, including a user-friendly, cross-platform editor, to some sort of content management, to automated publishing to the Web, and perhaps other formats such as PDF, RTF, etc.
2. If a mark-up technology, such as SGML/XML (which I would prefer) the way authors deal with content they cannot be burdened with learning a ton of markup. Ideally, they shouldn't have to learn much of anything... it should be a semi-WYSIWYG type editor such that the markup can be hidden from view and they can concentrate strictly on content and structure.
3. The authorship tool(s)/editor must be cross-platform, but the publishing engine and Web server could run on anything.
4. It shouldn't require a great deal of styling to get it to the Web. If I have to create a different style sheet for every darn document it isn't a good solution. It's technical documentation so it doesn't have to look too pretty, it just has to be structured sanely.
5. Preferably, it should be searchable on the Web.

I've looked at Arbortext, which has probably the best XML/SGML editor I've ever seen but they don't really have an integrated CMS/DMS (content management/documentation management system) and their web publisher is mucho bucks. I've looked at Crystal Software, Broadvision, etc. Everything comes in too high. My starting place was www.xmlsoftware.com but I can't find a whole, solid solution. For example, I setup Cocoon, a Java-based xml Web publishing engine from XML Apache.org but that still leaves me short an editor solution.

So here's the gist of my question: on one end of the scale, I could have users put technical documentation using Word. On the other end of the scale I could buy an integrated XML-based Web portal solution such as Data Channel. I need something in-between the lame and the awesome (but out of my price range). Any suggestions?? There have to be solutions out there, otherwise there's a whole untapped market I think."

Ragetech asks: "I've been given the seemingly impossible task of finding a way to do automated publishing to the Web for primarily technical documentation. The task doesn't sound so bad, until you start looking the constraints and emphasize the need for a _inexpensive_ solution. I've looked at many different vendors but all of the ideal solutions seem to have price tags around $100k and above. They don't seem to be targeting small- or medium-sized businesses at all, and $100k is way outside my price range. So what are people using out there to do this type of thing? I want to enable our users to publish technical documents/manuals to the Web, preferably with some sort of structure (like, say, the DocBook DTD) so they can concentrate on creating/updating/keeping alive content. What do people use?"

"Here's the gist of what I'm looking for:

1. Complete solution, including a user-friendly, cross-platform editor, to some sort of content management, to automated publishing to the Web, and perhaps other formats such as PDF, RTF, etc.
2. If a mark-up technology, such as SGML/XML (which I would prefer) the way authors deal with content they cannot be burdened with learning a ton of markup. Ideally, they shouldn't have to learn much of anything... it should be a semi-WYSIWYG type editor such that the markup can be hidden from view and they can concentrate strictly on content and structure.
3. The authorship tool(s)/editor must be cross-platform, but the publishing engine and Web server could run on anything.
4. It shouldn't require a great deal of styling to get it to the Web. If I have to create a different style sheet for every darn document it isn't a good solution. It's technical documentation so it doesn't have to look too pretty, it just has to be structured sanely.
5. Preferably, it should be searchable on the Web.

I've looked at Arbortext, which has probably the best XML/SGML editor I've ever seen but they don't really have an integrated CMS/DMS (content management/documentation management system) and their web publisher is mucho bucks. I've looked at Crystal Software, Broadvision, etc. Everything comes in too high. My starting place was www.xmlsoftware.com but I can't find a whole, solid solution. For example, I setup Cocoon, a Java-based xml Web publishing engine from XML Apache.org but that still leaves me short an editor solution.

So here's the gist of my question: on one end of the scale, I could have users put technical documentation using Word. On the other end of the scale I could buy an integrated XML-based Web portal solution such as Data Channel. I need something in-between the lame and the awesome (but out of my price range). Any suggestions?? There have to be solutions out there, otherwise there's a whole untapped market I think."

According to the Java Apache Project page, Avalon 3.0 alpha has been released. Avalon is a common framework for server applications written Java. If you are interested in more information you might want take a look here.

According to the Java Apache Project page, Avalon 3.0 alpha has been released. Avalon is a common framework for server applications written Java. If you are interested in more information you might want take a look here.

The latest version of the Apache 1.3.x Web server was released today with the announcement of the availability of Apache 1.3.14. Included in this release are security fixes for mod_rewrite and mod_vhost_alias, so it's strongly recommended to upgrade! Also included is support for "configuration directories" which behave similarly to init's rc.d directories.

The latest release was supposed to be 1.3.13, but a last minute build problem scrapped that version... Shame too, since the idea of the ASF was to release the 13th of 1.3 on the 13th.

The latest version of the Apache 1.3.x Web server was released today with the announcement of the availability of Apache 1.3.14. Included in this release are security fixes for mod_rewrite and mod_vhost_alias, so it's strongly recommended to upgrade! Also included is support for "configuration directories" which behave similarly to init's rc.d directories.

The latest release was supposed to be 1.3.13, but a last minute build problem scrapped that version... Shame too, since the idea of the ASF was to release the 13th of 1.3 on the 13th.

The latest version of the Apache 1.3.x Web server was released today with the announcement of the availability of Apache 1.3.14. Included in this release are security fixes for mod_rewrite and mod_vhost_alias, so it's strongly recommended to upgrade! Also included is support for "configuration directories" which behave similarly to init's rc.d directories.

The latest release was supposed to be 1.3.13, but a last minute build problem scrapped that version... Shame too, since the idea of the ASF was to release the 13th of 1.3 on the 13th.

Skapare asks: "A year ago, this question about using Apache and SSL in a commercial environment was asked in the Apache section of Slashdot. The RSA patent was still in force back then, and the focus was on commercial products like Raven. Since then, the RSA patent has been released and then expired. That same month a year ago, Ask Slashdot also featured a question about encumbrance of SSL/PGP. But with the RSA patent gone, and Diffie-Hellman before it, this surely opens up Apache with SSL free for commercial use. Now I'm exploring options for free SSL for Apache, and note at least two choices, Apache-SSL, and mod_ssl. What I'd like to ask is what are the fundamental and principle differences between these free versions that I should consider in deciding which I should use in a commercial environment."

Infoworld has released their list of the top E-Business Innovators and, lookie-lookie, the Apache Group was selected because of the Apache Server Project. What's also nice is that Infoworld "got it right" in attributing the work to the entire group, and getting the feel of how the group operates. No idea where they got the idea that the future Apache will "no longer be a C language-based Web server"...

Infoworld has released their list of the top E-Business Innovators and, lookie-lookie, the Apache Group was selected because of the Apache Server Project. What's also nice is that Infoworld "got it right" in attributing the work to the entire group, and getting the feel of how the group operates. No idea where they got the idea that the future Apache will "no longer be a C language-based Web server"...

Eric Sun writes "For you die-hard Apache users out there, the seventh alpha version of Apache 2.0 has been released. A list of the new features can be found here. As always, you can download it from the distribution site."

Eric Sun writes "For you die-hard Apache users out there, the seventh alpha version of Apache 2.0 has been released. A list of the new features can be found here. As always, you can download it from the distribution site."