Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C By:   Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern Published:   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.  - March 1999 Copyright © 1999 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Chapter 1 - Server-Side Programming with Apache
Ideas and Success Stories

To give you an impression of the power and versatility of the Apache API, here are some examples of what people have done with it. Some of the modules described here have been incorporated into Apache and are now part of the standard distribution. Others are third-party modules that have been developed to solve particular mission-critical tasks.

A movie database

The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/) uses mod_perl to make queries against a vast database of film and television movies. The system rewrites URLs on the fly in order to present pages in the language of the user's choice and to quickly retrieve the results of previously cached searches. In 1998, the site won the coveted Webby award for design and service.

No more URL spelling errors

URLs are hard things to type, and many HTML links are broken because of a single typo in a long URL. The most frequent errors are problems with capitalization, since many HTML authors grew up in a case-insensitive MS-DOS/Windows world before entering the case-sensitive web.

mod_speling [sic], part of the standard Apache distribution, is a C-language module that catches and fixes typographical errors on the fly. If no immediate match to a requested URL is found, it checks for capitalization variations and a variety of character insertions, omissions, substitutions, and transpositions, trying to find a matching valid document on the site. If one is found, it generates a redirect request, transparently forwarding the browser to the correct resource. Otherwise, it presents the user with a menu of closest guesses to choose from.

An on-campus housing renewal system

At Texas A&M University, students have to indicate each academic year whether they plan to continue living in campus-provided housing. For the 1997-1998 academic year, the university decided to move the process from its current error-prone manual system to a web-based solution. The system was initially implemented using ActiveWare's PerlScript to drive a set of Microsoft Internet Information Server Active Server Pages, but with less than two weeks to go before deployment it was clear that the system would be too slow to handle the load. The system was hurriedly rewritten to use mod_ perl on top of the NT version of Apache, resulting in a measured 60-fold increase in performance. The system went online in the nick of time and functioned without a hitch, serving 400,000 documents generated on the fly to 10,000 people over the course of the four-day registration period.

Scripting languages embedded in HTML

The PHP system (http://www.php.net/) is a powerful scripting language that processes programs embedded within HTML documents. The language provides support for persistent connections to ODBC and Unix databases, on-the-fly graphics, and LDAP searches. The language is implemented both as a CGI script that can run on top of any server and as a high-performance C-language module for Apache.

The ePerl (http://www.engelschall.com/sw/eperl/) and Embperl (http://perl.apache.org/ embperl/) systems are like PHP, but use mod_perl to embed snippets of Perl code directly inside HTML pages. They can do anything that Perl can do, including opening network connections to other Internet services, accessing databases, and generating dynamic documents based on user input.

An advertising banner server

No web application needs higher performance than banner ad servers, which are pummeled by millions of requests per day. One banner ad vendor, whose conventional CGI- based system was topping out at 1.5 banners per second, moved its system to mod_perl and experienced a greater than 10-fold performance boost. The vendor is now serving 10 million banners a week from a single host.

A dynamic map server

The www.stadtplandienst.de site uses the mod_perl API with the ImageMagick graphics library to create dynamic searchable tourist maps for Berlin and other German cities. The system is fast and responsive, despite the computationally intensive nature of its job and its frequently heavy load.

A commodities trading system

Lind-Waldock & Co. (http://www.lind-waldock.com/), the world's largest discount commodities trading firm, uses mod_perl running under the Stronghold version of Apache to generate live and delayed quotes, dynamic charts, and late-breaking news, as well as a frontend to their online order entry system. The system is tightly integrated with the company's relational database system for customer authentication and transaction processing.

Brian Fitzpatrick, a member of the consulting team that designed and implemented the system, was pleasantly surprised at how smooth the process was: "mod_perl allowed us to work the web server and code around our design--not the other way around."

A document management system

The Advanced Computer Communications company maintains more than 1500 documents in various formats scattered among multiple NFS-mounted file systems in its internal network. Their document management system periodically indexes the scattered documents by document name, creation date, and content, then uses the mod_perl interface to the Apache API to allow users to search and retrieve documents of interest to them. The system automatically performs document format conversion. Some are sent to the browser for download, others are precompressed with PKZIP to reduce transmission time, and still others are converted into formats that can be displayed directly in the browser window.

These applications represent only a few of the possible uses for the Apache module API. What you can do with it is limited only by your imagination. The rest of this book shows you how to turn your ideas into reality.