Newbies Find Help in O'Reilly's Latest Apache Book
by Peter Laurie, coauthor of
Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition
01/02/2003
Every couple of years the job comes round of revising Apache:
The Definitive Guide to produce a new edition; this past year
it was time for number three. Ben, my coauthor, and I live quite a way
apart and updating the book gives us the chance to work together for a
few months. I should say that Ben is my son: he lives in London, where
he is a director of the Apache
Software Foundation and is responsible for the Secure Sockets
Layer. He is also busy making a reputation for himself as an
international security guru. I live quite a distance away on the
Channel coast and we don't see each other that often. Of course, we
don't actually see each other when we're doing an Apache revision
either, which we do mostly by email and telephone, but it's fun
nevertheless and we're often quite polite to each other.
My role is to set up the demonstration Web sites, which form the
frame of the book and, as an
ex-journalist, to write most of the words. Ben's role is to make sure
that what we do and describe is useful, relevant, and technically
correct. He also contributes two chapters for programmers on writing
extra Apache modules.
When we think we have finished, have done a good job, and deserve
congratulations all around, O'Reilly's editors fix us a cold bath by
sending the draft out to a pack of ravenous technical reviewers. The
reviewers devote considerable effort to improving the manuscript by
pouring industrial-strength scorn on many of our most interesting
statements. In the process they improve our characters, which we
wrongly thought had been put in good shape last time. So, with every
edition we get morally finer and after a few more we will rank with
the angels for rectitude and righteousness.
This year the process was unusually abrasive and, I hope,
edifying. We wondered whether 9/11 and Enron had put our reviewers in
a particularly edgy mood or whether the cause was in ourselves. We had
finished the previous edition in the autumn of 1998. Since then I had
put my knowledge of Apache into use by setting up and running a couple
of real Web sites: www.Medic-Planet.com, a handy
medical encyclopaedia, now taken down because we couldn't get it to
pay a penny; and www.BridportPrize.org.uk,
an electronic version of one of the U.K.'s most successful literary
prizes.
By doing this, I found that what we had told people in our book was
not by any means all you needed to know. Both of these sites relied
on large, complicated relational databases and had to be able to take
money securely from their customers. If an amateur webmaster, like me,
was to do these things with Apache, he or she had to be able to
persuade a scripting language and a database manager to work together
with the server. In the first two editions we had left this as "an
exercise for the student" -- now I faced the reality of making it
happen myself.
Like so many things in life, this "exercise" is not that difficult
once you know how to do it. But getting to that point is not easy
because until you have it all working, nothing much happens. There are
thousands of ways to set up such a site wrong and not very many ways
to set it up right, so the beginner spends a lot of time looking at a
blank screen. With Ben's patient help, of course, it didn't stay
difficult for long, but I felt that many of our readers would not have
such a son at their elbow and could do with a bit of practical advice
and example.
A journalist's most important stock in trade is his ignorance. So I
decided to take advantage of my evaporating ignorance in order to
write the material that I would have liked to have read before I built
my own web sites.
As someone once said,
Because I was thirsty
I dug a well, that others might drink.
This is where our aims, those of our reviewers' and, perhaps,
though we hope not, our readers' diverged. To many of our reviewers
the new material seemed, frankly, silly. This was kindergarten stuff,
unworthy of a book from the prestigious house of O'Reilly on a subject
as grand as Apache and with a claim to being "definitive guide." They
themselves were experts. It had taken them a lot of time and effort to
learn what they know and from their vantage point high up on the
tech-mountain, we were describing scrambles among foothills so far off
and low down they were hardly visible.
But on the ground beginners face--as with many technologies--a
steep cliff right before them. Nothing makes sense because they don't
understand the basic ideas. Conceptually, beginners have to lift
themselves up the cliff by pulling at their own bootstraps. A
journalist must learn to say, "I don't know what you are talking
about." People then explain, you write it down, and earn a
living. Many people in technology hate to say that and they feel
uneasy about anyone who does. But are we writing for them?
Certainly we don't want them to say that we have anything
wrong. But on the other hand we aren't telling them much they don't
already know. Surely, the point of a book like this is that it should
tell its readers what they do not know. If it does not, there is
little point in either writing or reading it. We have to judge what to
include by what we think a substantial number of our readers might not
know and might hope to find out.
Part of our mission then is to explain all the core capabilities of
Apache and how to use them; the other part is to offer as painless an
introduction as we can to the business of getting Apache up and
running in a useful web site.
Netcraft reports that
there are now more than ten million active sites running Apache. The
normal turnover of life must mean that several hundred thousand Apache
Web sites change webmasters every year, and the newcomers can't all be
experts, so we figure that there must be one or two webmasters out
there who could use some basic guidance in getting started.
So, in the third edition of Apache:
The Definitive Guide, we have branched out from our previous
format to include a good deal of new material in several different
categories. We provide simple introductions to using Apache with the
main scripting languages and databases.
The languages we cover include PHP, Perl, Python, and Java via
Tomcat, with sample scripts to show how to use the languages to
extract data from a database, to generate HTML forms on the fly, to
extract new data from the returned messages and save it again in the
database. (This cycle encapsulates the basic rhythm of
e-commerce. Once you have chosen a language and mastered these
techniques the rest is just elaboration.)
Since we limit ourselves to open source software, we cover only
three possible databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MSQL (which is sort
of open source). They are all based on the standard SQL database
model and there is not a lot to choose between them. The links between
them and the scripting languages are relatively simple.
Since Perl is so popular we describe how to modify its link with
Apache to make it run well in a busy site. We look briefly at XML and
discuss Cocoon, which teams up with Apache to create XML on the
fly. Finally, we check over the operational and security problems of
using Apache in big commercial sites.
We also cover the changes from Apache v1.3 to v2. In fact, these
will have little impact on the ordinary webmaster: they affect the
internal architecture of the package and lay down a better foundation
for future developments. But they do mean that the module interface is
completely different and Ben has completely rewritten his two chapters
on this topic.
So we have done our bit; we have put in a good deal of work and a
good portion of the book is new material. We hope it will be even more
useful than it has been in the past.
O'Reilly & Associates recently released (December 2002) Apache:
The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition.
Sample
Chapter 11, Security, is available free online.
You can also look at the Table of
Contents, the Index, and
the Full
Description of the book.
For more information, or to order the book, click
here.
Peter Laurie
is the coauthor of Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3nd Edition
