OVERVIEW OF NEW FEATURES IN APACHE 1.3

New features with this release, as extensions of the Apache functionality
For more information, see the documentation included with this release
(htdocs/manual/) or http://www.apache.org/docs/

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.