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Open source

WHAT IS APR??????

APR is the Apache Portable Run-Time libraries. These will be used to help keep Apache cross-platform. The goal, is that platforms that wish to port Apache to them, will simply have to port APR, and the rest of Apache will just work. As proof that this can work, there have been projects successfully ported to APR.

1) Apache Bench. This small benchmarking program has been provided with Apache since before 1.3 went out the door. The only problem? It never worked on Windows, or any other system that didn't have standard Unix sockets. BeOS is another example that comes to mind. That is no longer an obstacle. Apache Bench-apr now works on any system that has successfully implemented APR.

2) HTPasswd. This utility program generates Apache password files. It has worked on multiple platforms since Apache-1.3.6 when Apache on NT got encrypted passwords. This new incarnation takes advantage of APR to help reduce the size of the source file.

3) Apache Web server. The Apache web server has successfully been using APR since the very first alpha release of Apache 2.0. The one lesson learned from the web server port, is that not all aspects of portable programming can be handled with a portability library. Some things are really platform dependant, and those must be written specifically for each platform. Apache does this with Multi-Processing Modules.