Which Web-Server Version?

"Apache's Web server has become the de-facto standard for anyone who is serious about delivering Web content on an open-source platform," says Tristan Louis, a New York-based developer. "I did have to decide whether to use Apache 1.3 or Apache 2.0."

Louis made his decision based on the features he felt best suited his needs.

"Influencing this decision was the modular architecture that Apache offers, but version 1.3 offered a much wider set of modules than 2.0--some of them more important to me than others--so I decided to hold back on using the bleeding-edge version," he says. Version 2.0 sports a simplified configuration, support for IPv6 and a new API that adds functionality without having to patch the core server.

Here are our favorite add-on modules for Apache's latest Web-server version

• mod_ssl handles OpenSSL encryption protocols.
• mod_dav supports the Distributed Authoring and Versioning specs for Web content.
• mod_ldap supports LDAP databases to store authentication credentials.
• mod_file cache adds file-caching features.
• mod_proxy is a more reliable and better-performing proxy server.