Apache Server Project Plan

THIS DOCUMENT IS CURRENTLY BEING UPDATED. PLANS POST 2.0 ARE STILL FUZZY!

This document aims to encapsulate our plans for world domination, uh, I mean, further work on the Apache web server. This is simply a statement of goals, is always subject to change, and should not be relied upon for business or mission-critical purposes. Nothing is guaranteed.

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2.0

• Multithreaded/Multiprocess hybrid
• An Apache runtime library
• Shared memory pools
• Absolute Enforcement of an "Apache Style" for code.
• Updated Configure/build/make process (autoconf?)
• Configuration API, so that different configuration loaders can be written (Perl, Java, etc.)
• More API hooks:
  • Post config-read; so we can check consistency between directives and abort the startup
  • Per child init
  • Per child die
  • Pre-handler; which asks round what could *potentially* be served on a URI; gets back a list of possible internal redirects with the mime-type/lang/charset and quality values.
  • Up to 4 placeholders for future use ?
• Logging enhancements
  • Separate logs for stderr and server error messages
  • Enable all virtual hosts to error-log to the same log, in ways which distinguish entries.
  • Syslog, with different debugging levels, a la named or sendmail
• Fully 1.1 compliant proxy module.
• Protocol abstraction layer, so that different protocol implementations can be distributed as a module.

2.1

• Check returns from all system calls: read, write, etc.
• Nicer Access Control (allow "OneOf","AND","OR" ala NCSA)
• Named Access Methods
• Implementation of the "LINK" Method
• Authentication API, to make authentication type and database type orthogonal
• Next-generation content negotiation support
• Data store abstraction API? So we're not always presuming we sit on top of a filesystem.
• Enable logging of all "POST"ed data - for commercial-database-like backups and replay ability.
• Support for CERN-style imagemaps? http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Daemon/User/CGI/HTImageDoc.html#config.
• give an "Option", like "IncludesNoExec", except allow for CGI includes, not CMD includes.
• Serious dynamic loading support, so that binary distributions can have all modules compiled and can be used even by folks without compilers of their own.
• Standardized PUT support, at least a perl script included with the distribution.

3.0

• HTTP-NG