Apache Module Porting
For those of you who have used Apache for many years, you have grown very attached to your modules written for Apache 1.3. And for those of you who have not used Apache before, Apache 2.0 is out and provides many performance through threading, portability through APR, and APU, and new feature enhancements like filters.
So what is holding you back from unleashing this new power that the ASF and many other contributors have worked several years on? Third party modules.
It took time to write a module for Apache 1.3 and it takes time convert and test a module under Apache 2.0, especially while ensuring that it works with a threaded Apache 2.0 server. Many open source developers do not have the time to work on porting as they only have so much spare time to work on the modules. You need a solution and you don't have time to wait for the developer to port the module before your system goes live. You have several options:
- find an alternate solution
- write your own custom module
- hire someone to write a custom module
- hire someone to port the module to Apache 2.0
The first two options can be costly and time consuming in terms of researching, testing, retraining, and converting existing configurations. The second being significantly time consuming doe to needing to rewrite the module.
We provide option 3, writing a new module from scratch through our Custom Apache Modules service. However in this case that again has the problems of retraining, and converting existing configurations, and has the same problem of option 2 in that it takes a considerable amount of time to rewrite the module.
Option 4, porting the module, is the best choice and we can port the existing module to Apache 2.0, and ensure that it retains the same feature set and configuration compatibility level as the original module. Porting the module will also take significantly less time than options 2 and 3.
We will work with the original author of the module and can submit our changes to the author for him or her to incorporate into the their main source tree thus allowing others to benefit from the port of the module.
The mod_log_sql module on this site is a result of porting the original Apache 1.3 version of the module to Apache 2.0, however in this case the original author decided to transfer the maintenance of the module to us.
