Overview of new features
New Features with Apache 1.3
New features with this release, as extensions of the Apache
functionality. Because the core code has changed so
significantly, there are certain liberties that earlier versions of
Apache (and the NCSA daemon) took that recent Apache versions are
pickier about - please check the
compatibility notes if you have any
problems.
In addition to a number of bug fixes and internal performance
enhancements, Apache
1.3 has the following specific new user features:
- Support for Windows NT/95
Apache now supports the Windows NT and Windows 95 operating systems,
as well as the Unix systems supported in previos releases. Although the
Windows version of Apache may not be perform as well as on the Unix
systems for which Apache was originally written, the ability to run on
Windows gives Apache the ability to run on a large number of web
servers it was not previously able to.
- Regular Expression support for Alias
and Redirect
New AliasMatch
,
ScriptAliasMatch
, and
RedirectMatch
directives allow for the use of regular expression matching.
Additionally, new
<DirectoryMatch>
,
<LocationMatch>
,
and <FilesMatch>
sections provide a new syntax for regular expression sectioning.
- New "Magic" MIME-typing
module
A new module, the optional mod_mime_magic
, has been
added. It uses "magic numbers" and other hints from a file's contents
to figure out what the contents are. It then uses this information to
set the file's media type, if it cannot be determined by the file's
extension.
- Directory indexing modules split
The mod_dir
module has been split in two, with
mod_dir handling directory index
files, and mod_autoindex
creating directory listings.
- Support for Directory Icon Sizing
The
mod_autoindex
module provides listings of directory contents when appropriate. If
the FancyIndexing option is enabled, each file in the
list is preceded by an icon representing the content type. In earlier
versions of Apache, the HTML IMG tags for these icons
weren't sized, so the browser had to wait until the images were loaded
before it could lay out the page. With 1.3, the
IndexOptions
directive has two new keywords which allow you to control whether
pre-sized IMG tags are used. This can substantially
speed up the display of large directory listings.
- AccessFileName
Enhancement
The <AccessFileName> directive can now take more than one
filename. This lets sites serving pages from network file systems and
more than one Apache web server, configure access based on the server
through which shared pages are being served.
- HostNameLookups now defaults to "Off"
The HostNameLookups
directive now defaults to "Off". This means that, unless explictly
turned on, the server will not resolve IP addresses into names. This
was done to spare the Internet from unneccessary DNS traffic.
- New child_init function for module API
A new phase for Apache's API is called once per "heavy-weight process,"
before any requests are handled. This allows the module to set up
anything that need to be done once per processes. For example,
connections to databases.
- NoProxy
and ProxyDomain
directives added to proxy, useful for intranets.