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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."
I just setup an Apache web server for use at home, and now I've got 4 Apache developers living in my basement. When they showed up, they said they were my Apache community overhead and I had to let them stay there. Oh, and I apparently have to feed them too!
After all, it's not like they created one of the most popular open source apps of all time or anything like that.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
You want to do a project? Okay, well nobody is forcing you to work with Apache. The Apache community keeps consistently turning out good products. This tells me they're doing something right.
Yeah, so with sourceforge you don't have to spend as much time on organizational matters. And also on sourceforge 98% of the projects are stalled out in the planning stage. I don't see an improvement there.
If you want simple, static content, thttpd is stupidly tiny, stupidly scalable, and way faster than Apache. Unfortunately it uses the old fork model for dealing with CGI scripts which make it quite slow as doing that (but no worse than the old NCSA httpd). It has a number of interesting features, such as per-filetype bandwidth throttling (so you can specify that MP3 files only get transferred at 10kB/sec), but also has some suprising omissions --- the MIME type database is hard-coded, and it only handles HTTP 1.1. But if you have a simple site based mainly around static pages, thttpd is probably ideal for your purposes.
Yes, Apache (Web server) is somewhat hard to configure. There's a large file with a lot of (documented) features and settings, and a lot of ways to go wrong there.
On the other hand, Apache is incredibly flexible: You can use it as a proxy, it does ssl, it fronts for Java Web servers, it rewrites URLs, it authenticates, it slices, it dices and I'm probably just scratching the surface.
Someone who knows his way around the config file - and that's really the only crucial thing to know about Apache - is able to get it to sing and dance. The header in the file warns people to read in-depth documentation rather than relying on comments in the file. There is documentation, there are books. If you're going to play at being a 'professional' Web admin, then you need some of this stuff.
For the less seriously inclined Web maker, programs like Webmin let you fiddle with a subset of Apache settings through a HTML front end. On an even broader front, many Web site hosters provide a dumbed-down interface that allows only a small subset of configuration options and keeps the user from doing anything really stupid.
And for anyone not covered above, yes, I'd recommend getting a simpler Web server. Personally, I find Tomcat a little easier to configure than Apache, but that's just me. I'm sure there are dramatically simpler products. Hell, lots of people have written their own!
The discussion in this topic is not about the complexity of using the Apache Web server, but the complexity of managing an Apache project. I'm not sure if I'd be perfectly happy "doing" an OS project under Apache, but... that's what choice is about, right?
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Or if you want something smaller than Apache and a little more than just static pages try http://www.lighttpd.net/. It is secure and beats Apache 2 performance wise and the configuration takes only a few minutes. It runs on my small server for months now and is certainly worth a look.
Out of curiousity, did any of the above posters actually read the article? Or even the Slashdot post?
This isn't about Apache's Web Server at all. It's about the Apache foundation, and running projects with them. Apache's web server is just an example of a project that is run under the Apache Foundation... and any bloat / hard configuration in httpd has little to do with Apache Foundation's "overhead".
You have to be kidding me? XML? Are you out of your mind? Apparently you've drank the XML koolaid and you're parroting it's usefulness for everything but ending world hunger. Almost every OSS project I use relies on the ease and simplicity of text configuration files. Of the few XML configuration files I've ever used, I've been left with a disgustingly horrible taste in my mouth afterwords.
Some of use don't want some GUI to do our configurations, and we certainly don't want to be at the mercy of one. When the GUI breaks or doesn't work (It's KDE only, it's gnome only, Xorg isn't installed, one doesn't exist yet, the ones available don't support these new options yet, ad infinium), we don't want to have to construct super perl scripts with XML capabilities to do mass changes in configuration files. Some of you might be fine with your tomcat's server.xml file being 1500 lines and the accompanying bloat, but I for one choose less complexity, even if the only advantage is controlling configurations more efficiently.
I'm not going to bash the Apache Foundation or Apache Developers, or even Apache itself. It's all good work, and lots of it, while I sit around doing SFA...so who am I to bitch?
However I believe that any bloat, be it at the Foundation, or developers, development, or Apache is all part-and-parcel of the Kitchen Sink mentality of computing.
I was going to blame the Linux community's Kitchen Sink mentality, but then I remembered Microsoft and their products (and just about everybody else) and realised that it's a computing thing, not platform specific.
Ever asked somebody to do an install for you, either because you don't have time, or it's new to you, or whatever? They will always install every last little thing, "Because you may need it someday".
I'm a minimalist when it comes to systems, and I mean minimalist: unless the system won't function without something, it's not installed. Yet I have never met anybody else with the same approach.
Humans and bloat go together I guess.
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?
Ok, whilst on free OS logo fetishes.
The Red Hat model.
http://www.madyiordache.com/TheRedHat.htm
I'd think at least twice before criticizing Apache's basic structure. There aren't many open source projects that are as successful as Apache and dominate their space as thoroughly.