- On Tools
- On Open Source
- The Apache Software Foundation and the Jakarta Project
- On Application Development
- Further Reading
1.3 The Apache Software Foundation and the Jakarta Project
Much of the software on which the Internet is constructed has always been open source, even before anyone called it that. One of the most important of these was a Web server written at the University of Illinois, which saw the Web from its infancy through 1995 or so. At that point development on this server stopped, and a number of Web masters informally picked it up and started adding new features. Note that this was only possible because the original source code was open. The result was called Apache, a play on words because it was "a patchy" server. To this day Apache is the most frequently used Web server by a sizable margin. It is no longer patchy and is among the most solid and robust code available.
As Apache grew, a number of related projects developed around it, and the Apache Software Foundation was eventually formed to organize and support them all.
Among these related projects was Tomcat, the reference implementation of Sun's first Servlet and JavaServer Pages specifications. Tomcat grew into a full-featured Web server in its own right, and some of its features are discussed in Chapter 17. History repeated itself during the development of Tomcat, and a number of sub- and related projects grew up around it. These were eventually grouped under the name "Jakarta."
There was a time when Jakarta could be thought of as the Java arm of Apache, but that is no longer strictly true. While every Jakarta project is written in Java, many Apache Java projects are no longer part of Jakarta. Apache has continued to grow and now includes subcategories for XML, databases, logging, and much more. Several Jakarta projects have been moved to these new hierarchies or, in some cases, given their own.