April 20, 2003
I was talking with someone the other day about post-processing some dynamically generated HTML before it was sent to the browser. They looked at me like I was crazy: you can't do that in Apache! It only allows one handler a shot at content generation. Well, yeah, except in the mod_perl world, where we have access to the entire request cycle. And, as it turns out, in Apache 2.0, which lets you string together output filters like in a Unix pipeline. Cool stuff.
Geoffrey Young, one of the authors of the mod_perl Developer's Cookbook has published an article on mod_perl filters in Apache 2.0 as an introduction to mod_perl 2.0. Well worth a read.
Guess who's anxiously looking forward to Practical mod_perl. That's right, baby.
I'm also waiting to use Apache 2.0. Until mod_perl and mod_php are stable on it, I can't really upgrade our servers at work. Rats.
On the upside, I have plenty of reason to upgrade to MySQL 4, as Jeremy Zawodny explains in January's Linux Magazine. This is great: I've been looking for a good summary to bolster my arguments in favor of the upgrade. Something that I don't think he mentions there is that in MySQL 4 you can change a lot of the server configuration variables on the fly, without having to stop and restart the server.
