IMO

So we (the ASF) have finished up our latest members meeting and, in addition to voting in new members, we also elected a new board. They are:

• Justin Erenkrantz
• J Aaron Farr
• Jim Jagielski
• Geir Magnusson Jr
• William A Rowe Jr
• Sam Ruby
• Henning Schmiedehausen
• Greg Stein
• Henri Yandell

Notwithstanding the number of Juniors on the board (pun intended), this represent 4 new directors (well, 3 completely new board members and one (Geir) who had served on the board a few years ago), which is a record for us. Great thanks go out to outgoing directors Ken, Dirk, Cliff and Sander. The ASF board is unique, in my opinion, because they don't steer or control the foundation as other boards do. Instead, this is done by the members. The board exists simply to allow the membership to continue doing what they want to do, and like doing. The power of the ASF really is in the hands of each and every member. As mentioned above, we also elected in 24 new members, but we won't be announcing their names until they are officially informed of their nominations and until we hear back whether or not they have accepted. But congrats go out to them as well!

ApacheCon is always, at least in my opinion, one of the premier conferences going. It's kind of nice having a conference where the presenters are not just exceptional users of the software, but the developers as well. The ASF has been doing ApacheCons for years now, and we're only able to do so by having sponsors help with the event. Unfortunately, at the last minute, we had a potential Gold sponsor pull out due to tight funding. So if you or your company or organization is capable of doing so, consider being a sponsor (and dare I say a hero) to ApacheCon. If interested, please contact Delia Frees and bring joy and happiness to a hacker's heart.

The Letter. The FAQ. The reason: because, in addition to other languages and technologies, the ASF values Java.

Sander and Nick somewhat recently blogged about how we're working on the "next generation" of the Apache web server, code named "amsterdam." My own personal codename for my design concept is "outback" and we'll see why in a bit. To be sure, we are at the very early stages, basically conceptual whiteboarding, if even there, right now. But some things are clear, at least in what major direction Apache will be taking. With 1.2 the big news was HTTP/1.1 compliance; with 1.3 it was Windows compatibility; with 2.0 it was threading; with 2.2 it's proxy, cache and large file improvements. With next-gen, it will be asynchronous, event-based processing... The real advantage of this can best be made clear using an analogy. I like to think of the way Apache works as similar to checking out at a grocery store. As people check out (requests come in), the are handled by a "dedicated" cashier (process or thread). The cashier is busy with that single person, and if more people need to check out, they need to be handled by other cashiers (the store manager, who then calls in extra cashiers, is the Apache parent process). As we all know, the problem occurs when there are more people checking out at the same time, and there aren't enough cashiers around; they queue up or are simply denied. To handle this, the move is more towards a restaurant and waiter-type design format. In this scenario, your "server" doesn't just sit there at your table, dedicated just to you. Instead, they move about, responsible for several diners, taking drink orders here, dessert orders there, delivering food hither and yon. This is much more efficient. Of course, there is a step even further, which some of you may have already guessed upon. There are, after all, times when your waiter is handling a lot of tables, and other waiters are handling almost none; your waiter may not be dedicated to you, but they are dedicated to their "section." The improvement is the way Outback Steakhouse tries to operate, where all waiters kind of do everything, and sometimes a different waiter will take your dinner order as compared to the one who took your drinks, etc. This is the most efficient, but also the trickiest one to pull off in a hybrid (process and thread based) server (the waiter "sections" could be considered process bound, in a way). It's also the source of my design codename: outback. This will be fun, but hard, especially when we want to maintain as much backwards compatibility as possible, as well as allowing the server to be useful on OS's that may lack the network calls (like epoll and kqueue) that make it "straightforward." Add in the current filter design and you can start seeing a lot of work needs to be done. But with serf, we may already have a good foundation to start off with.

A few people have expressed... well... "concern" is *way* too strong a word, but maybe "curiosity" is better, regarding the latest Netcraft survey in which Apache has seen a dip and IIS has seen a jump. Make no mistake: chipping away at Apache's lead is something that MS really, really wants to do, even if it's just for the numbers game and the PR aspects. That's why they are throwing money around to several hosting centers "encouraging" them to move their parked domains to IIS. It's also why they try as many tricks as possible to drive the numbers in their direction (hint: when you own a "community" service, it's trivially easy to quickly create thousands of "new sites" that show up on these surveys). Meanwhile, the ASF does *none* of these things. People depend on Apache because they are smart and they know better, not because we're "convincing" them to do so, or doing things to fudge the numbers. Just remember, unless you are running Windows, you *aren't* running IIS. And even then, a lot of really smart people are running Apache on Windows environments as well. So "misleading" numbers also serve another goal: "proving" that Linux/Solaris/BSD/whatever aren't really as popular as people say they are: after all, if a site is IIS, it must be Windows. Of course, this smacks down right in the face of what everyone sees and admits: open source is more popular than ever, and people are either migrating to it or starting off with it. And if someone is using Linux/Solaris/BSD/whatever, then they aren't going to be using IIS; maybe not Apache, but certainly not IIS. What's more interesting to me, in addition to the fact that Apache still has a commanding "lead" (whatever that means), is the fact that people who know, people whose business depend on the web, far and away rely on Apache over IIS. Apache handles much more traffic, by far, than IIS, and the traffic of high-end, "important" sites... Apache is popular because of what it *is* , not because of anything we do to "push it." Update: counter-point