What’s New and Improved in Apache 2.0 on Windows?

In April, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) released Apache 2.0.35 for Windows and with it a Microsoft System Installer (.msi) based binary distribution for all Windows versions from 95 through XP.

When the Apache Software Foundation released Apache 2.0.35 for Windows it also released a Microsoft System Installer based binary distribution for nearly all versions of Windows. Covalent Technologies engineer and Apache Software Foundation member William Rowe, Jr. offers an overview of the release’s three major improvements.

The ominous warnings for Windows users, such as, “Apache 1.3 is not yet optimized for performance …” and “not as stable or secure as the Unix version” are gone. Outside testing labs have found Apache 2.0’s performance to be comparable to Microsoft’s IIS product. And Apache 2.0 has finally arrived as a viable alternative to IIS on the Windows operating system.

All this might leave you wondering just what changed in respect to Windows between Apache 1.3 and 2.0 development.

This article outlines three major changes made to Apache that affect the ‘fringes’ (i.e., those platforms other than Unix), especially as they relate to the Windows platform. The first is a split between the server and the request processing logic into a Multiple Process Module, or MPM. The second change is the breaking out of platform-specific code into the Apache Portability Runtime library, or APR. The third, and biggest, Windows-NT-specific change is the introduction of Unicode, or utf-8 encoded filenames.