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Software Code Quality Of Apache Analyzed
fruey writes "Following Reasoning's February analysis of the Linux TCP/IP stack (putting it ahead of many commercial implementations for it's low error density), they recently pitted Apache 2.1 source code against commercial web server offerings, although they don't say which. Apparently, Apache is close, but no cigar..."
Analysis of the quantity of bugs in a software application is by no means a qualitative analysis of the performance of that application.
.02 in software bugs over a commercial, proprietary httpd server any day.
The predominant httpd servers available on the market today are Apache; iPlanet/SunOne; and IIS. Additionally, there are lesser-known httpd servers (zeus, cern), as well as 'niche' httpd servers (caucho) which typically perform additional functions to parsing HTML code (such as acting as a Java server, etc).
According to Netcraft, Apache is the #1 httpd server in use today, and has been for nearly 7 years.
Regardless of the purported 'quality' provided by commercial, closed-source alternatives, the Apache httpd server is the only solution in the marketplace that supports - in a stable, qualitative fashion - a startling variety of additional software to provide functionality to a website.
A primary example of this bundled flexibility would be the vast number of scripting languages supported by Apache. Java, Perl, PHP, and TCL are all free, stable, and work wonderfully with Apache. This kind of flexibility in application environments is simply unparalleled by the other httpd servers.
You might say that 'you can run java, perl, php, and tcl on iPlanet or IIS, though'. Sure you can. Have you tried that?
First, your commercial vendor won't support it - Microsoft will only support you if you're running ASP.NET et al on IIS; Sun will only support you if you're running Java on iPlanet.
Second, non-supported scripting languages often don't work on non-apache httpd servers. Why? Because the source code for the httpd server isn't available to the scripting language developers - making intelligent integration more difficult - additionally, the major vendors don't test competitive scripting language functionality on their products, meaning that while the writers of PHP, Perl, TCL, etc may offer a version of their product for other httpd servers - Microsoft and Sun aren't testing them on their httpd servers - plus, they aren't guaranteed to work, and often don't. (At my company, we've never been able to get PHP to work correctly under iPlanet - and guess what? Sun doesn't give a shit. Big surprise, huh?).
Commerical httpd servers may indeed have less bugs - but they certainly are not as stable in performance, nor do they support as wide a variety of available software extensions - as Apache.
I'll gladly take that extra
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