Example of mod_cache application

In the previous articles we told you what cache is and how it works in Helicon Ape. Now it’s time to use obtained knowledge in practice. Today we gonna apply caching for PHP application called qdig that helps organize images web-gallery. Read how to register PHP on IIS7 in our article about WordPress.

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Improvements in Helicon Ape release version

For those still hesitating whether to try release version of Helicon Ape or not we want to outline the mian differences between release and beta.

So, release (unlike beta) includes:

mod_cache module to reduce traffic by caching HTTP content
mod_gzip module to compress HTTP responses to further minimize server load
complete docs
enhanced Helicon Ape Manager
important bug fixes

Release version of Helicon Ape can now boast 19 Apache-compatible modules and easy-to-use manager for comfortable Apache emulation on IIS7.

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Helicon Ape released!

It has happened! Helicon Ape has been released and is now available for download and purchase!
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Posted in Helicon Ape | Tagged news | 681 Comments

How mod_cache works?

Helicon Ape release (coming very-very soon) will contain mod_cache module. And as we promised in our previous article we are now giving you more thorough description of mod_cache operation.

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Posted in Helicon Ape | Tagged caching guide mod_cache | 34 Comments

Web Caching: what is it?

What is that and what’s it for?

Web cache is a vital instrument to build lightning-fast web apps. Web cache stores HTTP responses that may be provided to the user without making a request to the server, i.e. no ASP/PHP scripts execution and database queries are necessary. And that’s cool!
Web-caching allows to substantially reduce response time — time the server needs to give the response — as reading from cache is much faster than processing request with PHP handler.
Web-caching minimizes traffic — if one uses intermediate caches (gateway or proxy cache), request won’t reach the origin server — response will be given back by an intermediate caching server.

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Posted in Helicon Ape | Tagged caching mod_cache | 246 Comments

Tuning WordPress with Helicon Ape on IIS7 (permalinks, browser/server caching, compression)

WordPress is a highly popular and rapidly growing open source CMS providing powerful blog-designing facilities. Accounting for its popularity we decided to write an article in which we’ll show how to optimize, speed up, prettify WordPress operation using Helicon Ape. So, let’s start.
Prerequirements: Windows 2008/Vista, IIS7, FastCGI, Helicon Ape

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Posted in Helicon Ape | Tagged cms guide mod_expires mod_gzip mod_headers mod_rewrite wordpress | 9 Comments

Helicon Ape 1.0.0.12 – firm step ahead!

Pretty much time has elapsed since the release of the first public build of Helicon Ape (1.0.0.10). We’ve made every effort to spend this time as efficiently as possible to make you a small Christmas gift. And here it is ready to rejoice you!

The main improvements in build 12 include:

check of available updates
kernel cache support
password generator for basic/digest authentication
NE, ENV flags processing in mod_rewrite

Here’s the complete change log.

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URL-rewriting basics and map-files application

Lack of understanding of basic URL-rewriting concepts often leads to the problems with rules-writing. So we decided to give a brief and simple explanation of some general concepts.

URL-rewriting allows to substitute real (often ugly) URLs with pretty ones and expose them to users as well as to search engines. The idea is that the user requests for example http://www.site.com/pretty_file.htm (this link is indexed by search engines) and in reality browser shows the content of say http://www.site.com/index.aspx?id=123 (that is real physical file on your server).

Regular expressions empower you to create more complex and efficient rules and add conditions to gain better flexibility and performance.
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Posted in Helicon Ape, ISAPI_Rewrite | Tagged guide mod_rewrite | 3 Comments

How to enable mod_rewrite in Helicon Ape

Hope you’ve already installed Helicon Ape and are ready to have a look at it. So, let’s start!