Apache Portable Runtime

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The Apache Portable Runtime (APR) is a supporting library for the Apache web server. It provides a set of API's that map to the underlying operating system. Where the OS doesn't support a particular function, APR will provide a replacement. Thus, the APR can be used to make a program truly portable across platforms.

APR was originally a part of Apache, but has now been spun off into a separate project of the Apache Software Foundation, and is used by other applications to achieve platform independence.

The range of platform-independent functionality provided by APR includes:

• Memory allocation and memory pool functionality
• Atomicity operations
• Dynamic library handling
• File I/O
• Command argument parsing
• Locking
• Hash tables and arrays
• Mmap functionality
• Network sockets and protocols
• Thread, process and mutex functionality
• Shared memory functionality
• Time routines
• User and group ID services

Similar projects

• Glib provides similar functionality, but is much more extensive, supporting many more data structures and OS-independent functions.
• NSPR is a cross-platform abstraction library used by the Mozilla project. It is used by another subproject of Mozilla XPFE to provide cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) functionality.
• Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) is an object-oriented library similar in functionality to APR. It is widely deployed in commercial products.
• WxWidgets is an object-oriented cross-platform GUI library that also provides abstraction classes for database communication, IPC and networking functionality.

External links

• [The APR website]
• [APR programming documentation]
• [The Apache Software Foundation website]

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