This morning, we've had the honor of hosting the Apache Software Foundation in the Windows Server 2008 Application Labs. They are here this week in order to get some deep knowledge about Windows Server 2008, and access to the folks from product groups who can help them make their apps work better under Windows Server.
We asked them out to campus because we are extremely interested in having the Apache web server (well, all the Apache projects) run great on Windows Server 2008. Now, every time I say that, some folks always want to know "Why would you want that?" or "What do the IIS folks think about that?"
Well, it turns out that some folks have apps that run on Apache. Yes, even on Windows. Sometimes, it's a matter of investment in a particular solution where their app uses Apache. It could even be that they just simply prefer the model that Apache provides. Regardless, it's important to us that those applications run as good as they possibly can on the Windows platform.
As to the question about IIS, there are several Apache projects like Tomcat that currently support IIS, and hey, we'd like to have even better support. To make that happen, we've asked some folks from the IIS team to join us in the labs, where they can open up and give the assistance that is needed.
By midday, two fine gentlemen from the Compatibility Lab (Pat Altimore and Maarten Van De Bospoort) presented a great session about general compatibility issues with Windows Server 2008.
In the afternoon, we had Ari Pernick (along with a posse of extremely knowledgeable folks, whose names I did not get... but I will) come out from the Core Networking group. They spent about two and a half hours going through details in the Windows Server 2008 networking stack, as well as a deep investigation of the HTTP.SYS technology. Now, I’m no slouch when it comes to this stuff, but I tell ya, I learned a lot yesterday just sitting in on that. From the water-cooler conversations that we had later in afternoon, I would expect that we’re going to see some interesting changes in Apache httpd, and Tomcat in the future.
After that, we took an hour and came up with a list of other issues and questions that the Apache folks had, so we can drag in some more product groups on Tuesday and Wednesday.
As for the evening, we all went out to the Rock Bottom Brewery for some food and drinks and some socialization—I took a few pictures, and I’ll get them up as soon as I can.