By getting up early this morning, I discovered something about the
Caribe Royale: they turn off the waterfall that cascades into the pool
each night and turn it back on again in the morning. The courtyard
was blissfully quiet this morning, without the waterfall and the
hordes of rambunctious children. But I'm glad that they turn the
waterfall back on before most kids get up. Otherwise, dads would find
it even easier to torment their kids like my dad did when I was five,
when he had me convinced that they turn Niagara Falls off each night.
In my travels among the various conference sessions, I noticed a lot
of interest in the three PHP talks that took place today. In the
morning session, Nathan Wallace gave a talk entitled PHP: Hacker's
Paradise. This talk was well attended and Nathan had quite a crowd
around him after the talk, with people asking all sorts of technical
questions about how to do various things with PHP. The other two
talks, on using PHP with SQL backends and sessions and authentication,
also seemed popular, despite the fact that they overlapped with talks
on Apache 2.0 and the future of Apache beyond 2.0.
In another morning session, Mark Cox and Geoff Thorpe gave an
interesting presentation on Apache E-Commerce Solutions. The
buzzword-compatible title was a bit misleading, as the talk focussed
primarily on Apache and SSL. Mark and Geoff talked a lot about the
performance implications of using SSL, both in a single-server setup
and with multiple servers that support a high-volume site. Their
conclusion is that SSL session caching needs to be handled as a
separate service, accessible to all of the web servers in a server
farm, rather than being localized to each individual server.
In the final keynote of the conference, Patricia Sueltz, Sun
Microsystem's President of Software Products and Platform, talked
about three bets that Sun made in 1995: Internet, Network Services,
and Bandwidth. They are making three new bets in 2000: Massive Scale,
Network Stack, and Always On, Always Connected. Sueltz also talked
about Sun's interaction with the open source community--how they are
listening, learning, and responding. She also talked about her belief
that a technology goes through four phases in its steward lifecycle: a
nurturing phase, a community involvement phase, a standards bodies
phase, and finally a public domain phase.
In the first afternoon session, Manoj Kasichainula gave a talk on the
new features in Apache 2.0, including the new multiple-processing
modules (MPMs). MPMs are modules that determine how requests are
mapped to threads or processes, so that Apache can support different
ways of using processes and threads, based on the underlying operating
system and other factors. For example, when Apache is running on a
Linux system, it is better to have multiple processes each running
multiple threads that service requests. But on Windows, which doesn't
handle multiple processes very well, the solution is one process with
multiple threads. Most users don't have to worry about MPMs, as each
instance of Apache uses a single MPM that is set at compile-time. The
overall impetus for Apache 2.0 is improved scalability.
In the next session, a panel of Apache members held an interactive
discussion about the future of Apache beyond 2.0. The panel included
Ryan Bloom, Bill Stoddard, Greg Stein, Allan Edwards, Ken Coar, and
Manoj Kasichainula. Each panelist talked some about what
functionality he was interested in adding beyond Apache 2.0 and then
the audience was given the opportunity to add their requests. The big
issues seemed to be layered I/O and scalability.
Now that the conference is over, I'm headed back home to Colorado. It
has been warm and sunny here in Orlando, in fact too warm for my
tastes. But in less than 24 hours, I plan to be up in the mountains
skiing, which is much more to my liking.
