Mohammed obaidan wrote: [...] My grain of salt : It is your time you will be spending, and how you spend it is up to you.So I do not want to discuss whether it is a good idea or not, or whether you can or cannot or should or should not do it. This is thus just a personal opinion, to add to the list for your consideration.
If you have a look at the graphical configuration interface for IIS, you will see that it is a fairly complex piece of work. Lots of dialogs, lots of tabs, lots of options, etc.. Yet in that case, we are talking about a commercial product made by one company, following rather strict guidelines of what things should look like, what users expect, how pieces interact with one another, etc..
Apache, being something made by lots of volunteer people, much more independent of one another that MS employees are, with a lot more freedom to think along their own lines, is a different animal. The basic principles of the Apache configuration are fairly standard. But each module used within Apache has a bit of its own logic when it comes to configuration, which parameter fits with which other or not, and how they interact with the basic Apache and with other modules. In addition, although the Apache httpd team does a great work of orcherstrating the releases so that in the end there is a usable and reliable product, each module still has much its own life and its own release schedule. So in the end, I believe that making a generic tool that would handle all of these differences would be very complicated, and very time-consuming to keep up-to-date.
About the point of creating an interface that would help configure the basic Apache, but not the individual modules : As some people have pointed out before, basically every operating system nowadays already includes an Apache package, managed by the standard "package manager" of that OS distribution. Using that tool, a system manager can install/deinstall/upgrade a basic working Apache within a couple of minutes at most. Adding or removing an Apache extension module is almost as easy in most cases, and in many cases adding or removing a VirtualHost also. But, at least in 50% of the cases, the basic Apache configuration is not enough, and one needs a series of the extension modules to be configured according to a very specific configuration and usage. In my view thus, it is more at the level of each extension module, rather than at the level of the generic Apache configuration, that a better interface would be useful. If I'm not mistaken, that's what webmin is about : it provides a kind of generic "framework" where one can plug in different modules, as long as these modules follow some basic rules. I don't know if webmin's logic is adaptable to Apache extension modules, but if it is, that's the direction I would follow. And if it isn't, then maybe defining such a generic interface, where each Apache module author can just easily "plug-in" his own graphic management module for his own extension module, would be a worthy enterprise.
In the end however, there is another aspect.I believe that the users/managers of software like Apache, and users/managers of software like IIS, have fundamentally a different point of view and approach to such issues. People who like IIS and its graphical interface, are generally people who grew up with Windows and its graphical interface. They consider this to be the "normal" way of things. They are prepared to sacrifice a bit of understanding of what is really going on behind the scenes (e.g. in the dark corners of the Windows Registry), to the facility and ease of use of a graphical interface that makes things simpler on the surface. On the other hand, the people who like Apache as it is now, like to know exactly what is going on, and are prepared for that to go through the sometimes tedious editing of configuration files by hand with a text editor, knowing that by doing so they can really drive the process exactly like they want, without some kind of "wizard" popping up and pretending to be smarter than themselves.
So the thing is, assuming you would create such an interface, would there really be a public willing to use it ? Considering that for the people that just want to install and configure a basic Apache, it is already easy on most systems; and considering that due to the nature of Apache and its modules, it is always going to be very hard to create a graphical interface that satisfies the needs of the more finicky others, I personally doubt it. But then, for some system administration tasks, I also enjoy the facilities offered by some graphical interfaces, so maybe I'm wrong.
Good luck anyway. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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