To be as simple as possible: It's a program which makes World Wide Web pages available to everyone who points a webbrowser to your Internet site. Every webpage on the Internet (or intranet) is served by an so called httpdaemon (hyper text transfer protocol daemon). Apache is the most used web server in the Internet and is now available for the Amiga.
The Amiga Apache http server is fully compatible with the Unix version of the Apache http server which can be found at www.apache.org.
The Amiga Apache project is runned by Amiga volunteers who think that the Amiga could benefit from a professional http server like Apache. We do it for free, since the Apache sources are for free too. The real work is therefore not done by us, but at the Apache server project. However, it still needs a lot of work before it runs on the Amiga.
At this moment there are three of us: Jeff Shepherd, who does the really hard work, Bert Vortman, the webmaster, package maintainer & developer of the Amiga Apache homepage and Rüdiger Kuhlmann who made the Apache_1.3.4 available and gave the project a new push. The sources are compiled by Jeff Shepherd, who compiled succesfully the Pine, Pico, Pilot, Imapd and Ipopd sources. He is also one of the developers of the Ixemul.library, he added the network support of ixemul.
Well, there was for a few months a big silence at the Amiga Apache Site. Bert has a new provider which didn't offer a static ipaddress needed for the mailinglists and also on a personal level in his life things were not too great which made that the Project was at hold. My sincere excuses to everybody who waited for new development.
Well, basically, Jeff has compiled the sources and made some changes in the Ixemul.library in order to run Apache. The 1.3.4 sources are succesfully compiled now and we await bug reports from you all. We are now at the 1.3 release, since the 1.0.5 apache version that Jeff Shepherd uploaded to the Aminet archives.
With the help of the Amiga Apache server it is possible to make a real professional internet server out of the Amiga with enhanced capabilities. Here are some ideas:
These things are possible with the REXX interface that most of the Amiga programs supports. For example: you can a make HTML page where you put a form with some questions. With 'submit' you execute a REXX program that reads the data from the html form, puts the data in a database (Fiasco or Superbase for example), and returns with a message. It's then very easy to maintain the data, much easier than on a UNIX machine. Print it, save it, make a chart, save it in Lotus 123 format, delete it, port it to a PC, etc, etc. The possibilities are endless, use your own creativity! These kind of applications are very easy to make with a little knowledge of REXX and sh.
If you have made an application or a script that uses the Apache webserver, please let us know! Send us also the location of sites that really uses Amiga Apache (It does not matter if the site is 24h a day online or not!)