ApacheCon US 2008 Session

An httpd module for the Atom Publishing Protocol

The Atom Publishing Protocol is described in RFC5023, completed in 2007. There are a variety of implementations with good interoperability. mod_atom is an implementation of the APP as an apache module. Its goals are simplicity and performance are important. To have multiple APP-updatable publications, you should need only one line in an httpd config file, and you should ideally be able to flow updates into multiple publications in parallel at available network wire speeds. mod_atom, now available on Googlecode, attempts to achieve high performance via tight integration with httpd and use of the unadorned filesystem as a backing store. Early test results indicate high performance; by Apachecon, there will be fairly comprehensive results about how fast mod_atom can go and how to tune httpd to achieve this. Apache httpd is currently how a large part of the material that's retrieved from the web is retrieved. With APP in general and mod_atom in particular, it could become the vehicle via which a high proportion of the Web's content is stored as well as retrieved.