Overview of New Features in Apache 2.0
Enhancements: Core | Module
- Unix Threading
- On Unix systems with POSIX threads support, Apache can
now run in a hybrid multiprocess, multithreaded mode. This
should improve scalability.
- New Build System
- The build system has been rewritten from scratch to be
based on autoconf and libtool. This makes Apache's
configuration system more similar to that of other
packages.
- Multiprotocol Support
- Apache now has some of the infrastructure in place to
support serving multiple protocols. mod_echo has been written
as an example.
- Better support for non-Unix
platforms
- Apache 2.0 is faster and more stable on non-Unix
platforms such as BeOS, OS/2, and Windows. With the
introduction of platform-specific multi-processing modules (MPMs) and the
Apache Portable Runtime (APR), these platforms are now
implemented in their native API, avoiding the often buggy and
poorly performing POSIX-emulation layers.
- New Apache API
- The API for modules has changed significantly for 2.0.
Many of the module-ordering problems from 1.3 should be gone.
2.0 does much of this automatically, and module ordering is
now done per-hook to allow more flexibility. Also, new calls
have been added that provide additional module capabilities
without patching the core Apache server.
- IPv6 Support
- On systems where IPv6 is supported by the underlying
Apache Portable Runtime library, Apache gets IPv6 listening
sockets by default. Additionally, the Listen,
NameVirtualHost, and <VirtualHost> directives support
IPv6 numeric address strings (e.g., "Listen
[fe80::1]:8080").
- Filtering
- Apache modules may now be written as filters which act on
the stream of content as it is delivered to or from the
server. This allows, for example, the output of CGI scripts
to be parsed for Server Side Include directive by
mod_include.
- mod_ssl
- New module in Apache 2.0. This module is an interface
to the SSL/TLS strong encryption protocols provided by
OpenSSL.
- mod_dav
- New module in Apache 2.0. This module implements the HTTP
Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) specification for
posting and maintaining web content.
- mod_auth_db
- Now supports Berkeley DB 3.0
- mod_auth_digest
- Includes additional support for session caching across
processes using shared memory.
- mod_charset_lite
- New module in Apache 2.0. This experimental module allows
for character set translation or recoding.
- mod_file_cache
- New module in Apache 2.0. This module includes the
functionality of mod_mmap_static in Apache 1.3, plus adds
further caching abilities.
- mod_headers
- This module is much more flexible in Apache 2.0. It can
now modify request headers used by mod_proxy, and it can
conditionally set response headers.