introduction
At its most basic a web site is composed of a web server and a few HTML pages. The most popular web server is named Apache.
Apache is an open web server. Closed web servers include Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) and Sun Java System Web Server.
what it is
The Apache web server is an application produced by the Apache HTTP Server Project. It is the most popular web server in the Internet.
Apache is an open source software application.
- It is developed using community participation,
- the source code is available to everyone,
- there is no charge for its use and
- it is protected by an open license.
There are two versions of Apache. The original version 1 has been around for a decade and the newer version 2 for six years. Version 1 is proven, well known and many extra products are available for it. New features are no longer added to Version 1 but it is being maintained. Version 2 has new fangled devices like threading. Linux distributions include version 2.
Apache is either supplied as an application that is ready to run or as a collection of source code files that need to be compiled into an application. You install an application on Linux using a a Linux software installation package, which is usually an RPM (Redhat Package Manager) archive. RPMs are simple to use and are available in a variety of configurations to supply all common requirements. Creating an application from source code is a much older method. It allows for customisation and for creating applications for uncommon operating systems. Compilation is a little tricky.
A server is made up of several processes. When you start apache, you start one process which starts a few more to help with the work.
what it isn't
Small and fast. It is a versatile web server. Some people use simple web servers for requests for simple content like images.
where it is
Everywhere in the Internet.
history
In 1989 Tim Berners Lee started work on the WWW and two years later it was ready for action. The web server was called CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, the place where Tim Berners Lee worked). It would only work using a UNIX OS called NeXTStep.
In 1993 Rob McCool and Marc Andreessen wrote a web server that ran on many types of UNIX. It was named NCSA HTTPd (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the place where they worked, HTTP for the protocol the web servers understand and "d" for daemon).
In 1995 Brian Behlendorf and a few others started patching the NCSA server, came up with the name Apache (a corruption of "a patchy web server", allegedly), formed the Apache group and released Apache 1.0.
In 1999 the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) was created.
In 2000 Apache 2 alpha 1 was released at a convention called ApacheCon.
