The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT.
The main goal of Apache HTTP Server is to provide an efficient, secure and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.
Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since 1996.
The Apache HTTP Server Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server.
The project is jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using the Internet and the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and its related documentation.
This project is part of the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, hundreds of users have contributed ideas, code, and documentation to the project.
Apache is run on millions of Internet servers. It has been tested thoroughly by both developers and users. The Apache HTTP Server Project maintains rigorous standards before releasing new versions of our server, and our server runs without a hitch on over 70% of all WWW servers available on the Internet. When bugs do show up, we release patches and new versions as soon as they are available.

· Is a powerful, flexible, HTTP/1.1 compliant web server
· Implements the latest protocols, including HTTP/1.1 (RFC2616)
· Is highly configurable and extensible with third-party modules
· Can be customised by writing 'modules' using the Apache module API
· Provides full source code and comes with an unrestrictive license
· Runs on Windows 2003/XP/2000/NT/9x, Netware 5.x and above, OS/2, and most versions of Unix, as well as several other operating systems
· Is actively being developed
· Rncourages user feedback through new ideas, bug reports and patches

What's New in This Release:
· prefork MPM: Run cleanups for final request when process exits gracefully to work around a flaw in apr-util.
· mod_reqtimeout: Do not wrongly enforce timeouts for mod_proxy's backend connections and other protocol handlers (like mod_ftp). Enforce the timeout for AP_MODE_GETLINE. If there is a timeout, shorten the lingering close time from 30 to 2 seconds.
· Proxy balancer: support setting error status according to HTTP response code from a backend.
· mod_authnz_ldap: If AuthLDAPCharsetConfig is set, also convert the password to UTF-8. PR 45318.
· core: check symlink ownership if both FollowSymlinks and SymlinksIfOwnerMatch are set
· core: fix origin checking in SymlinksIfOwnerMatch
· mod_headers: Enable multi-match-and-replace edit option
· mod_log_config: Make ${cookie}C correctly match whole cookie names instead of substrings.
· mod_dir, mod_negotiation: Pass the output filter information to newly created sub requests; as these are later on used as true requests with an internal redirect...