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Apache Comes With Too Much Community Overhead?
drizzle writes "There's an interesting story on the Apache Marketing blog about whether or not Apache projects come with too much overhead, especially compared with other services or a roll-your-own approach. The article states, 'It's true that compared with SourceForge, Apache has a more rigorous management structure. The ASF has formalized processes and procedures that we believe represent best practices governance. All new projects must pass through an incubation period to ensure that all of the project's members have internalized these processes. However, each project's leadership has a tremendous amount of discretion in managing within this framework.' There is also a follow up article written by one of the httpd developers about 'What Apache brings to the table.' The article cites community, experience, legal framework, diversity, brand strength, and networking as reasons why developers and companies should consider bringing their projects over to Apache."
How about the "overhead" of the various BSDs? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all have what could be described as "too much overhead" in their development model. Yet all three are considered among the shining stars of FOSS operating systems. Stable, robust, and "you know what you're getting".
BTW- Apache is developed primarily on FreeBSD.
Two words why you shouldn't use Apache unless you absolutely need to (and most apache users don't NEED apache): configuration complexity.
Apache's configuration file hasn't changed dramatically since the days of v1.3, and it's still an absolute train wreck. It is seconded in nightmarish complexity and eccentricities by Sendmail- and barely at that. See the old slashdot story Why I hate The Apache Webserver.
I have an idea. Let's see replies here, suggesting Apache alternatives that are a)lightweight b)easy to configure c)open source with BSD or GPL (or similar) licensing. Why? IMHO, the Apache group has gotten a little too comfy with their market dominance and years of blind faith from unix users. Sounds like it's time to remind them that especially if you're already on an open-source platform, you have a lot of choices.
Let's see lots of people trying out different webservers, helping improve them if they come across problems, and helping integrate these different webservers into distributions better, and so on. (That debian package for "joeserve" out of date? Help update it! Init scripts a mess? Spend 15 minutes coding up some improvements and email in a diff to the maintainer. Etc.)
Please help metamoderate.
Why don't they just make the configuration file XML, release the specs, and someone comes out with a GUI configuration editor. Problem solved.
I'm dreading the upgrade to BSD.
Don't Be
I know this will probably get laughed at, but seriously... What about IIS ? AFAIK, ebay uses IIS, and from what I've used of it, it can do just as much as Apache (but I only have limited experience of both....)
Just one link, but it should speak for itself:
s ure/2004-06/1004.html
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclo
KBB, by choosing to run IIS, infected every web visitor of theirs one fateful day. Do you want to be _that_ guy?
Yes, Apache 1.x is enormously popular. But that's not where the work in the Apache project has gone recently; recently, they have been working on Apache 2.x, XML-related projects, and lots of other projects. Are you using any of those more recent projects? How much impact have those projects actually had? And is the amount of effort that has gone into them justified by their impact?
...I thought apache.org was primarily about Java projects.
I won't go into a troll about how challenging it was, trying to set up Tomcat to work with a database.
Poring over the source code, what I gathered was that they were using XML files and the admittedly interesting reflection features of the JVM to more or less script the JVM and quite a bit of the app server, especially the security stuff.
The documentation was less than illuminating, and the source code little help. So I took a failing grade in the software engineering class, quit school, and got on with life.
Anyway, a survey of apache.org would reveal an overwhelming Java bias in their projects, no?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Where would you host it? Apache, Source Forge, or somewhere else?
How important do you think the Apache brand is to attracting new developers to your project?
IIS just seems like it does as much because the administration tools for it are so complicated. If there's one beautiful thing about apache it is that if you get a solid configuration you can simply scp it to the next machine and you are golden. However, comparing the functionality built into IIS to Apache's built in functionality is just ridiculous. I haven't used the newer versions of IIS, but I am pretty sure that they can't be configured as a proxy server, and I am positive that they don't have Apache's powerful URL rewriting ability. You also can easily setup up Apache to authenticate against all sorts of data sources from plain text files, to Active directory, to databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL. I am sure that the real Apache gurus could make a very long list of the features that Apache has that IIS doesn't have.
I've been monitoring Roller's transition through Apache's incubator process. You can get a glimpse of all the legal licensing issues a project has to go through to become compliant. Definitely an interesting read:
r -roller-dev/200511.mbox/thread
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubato
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