Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

Apache Portable Runtime

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Stable release
  
1.5.2 / April 29, 2015

Written in
  
C

Type
  
Development Library

Development status
  
Active

Operating system
  
Cross-platform

Apache Portable Runtime

Developer(s)
  
Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Portable Runtime (APR) is a supporting library for the Apache web server. It provides a set of APIs that map to the underlying operating system (OS). Where the OS does not support a particular function, APR will provide an emulation. Thus programmers can use the APR to make a program truly portable across platforms.

Contents

APR originally formed a part of Apache HTTP Server, but the Apache Software Foundation spun it off into a separate project. Other applications can use it to achieve platform independence.

Functionality

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

  • Memory allocation and memory pool functionality
  • Atomic 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. It supports many more data structures and OS-independent functions, but fewer IPC-related functions. (GLib lacks local and global locking and shared-memory management.)
  • Netscape portable runtime (NSPR) is a cross-platform abstraction library used by the Mozilla project. It is used by another subproject of Mozilla application framework (XPFE) to provide cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) functionality.
  • Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) is an object-oriented library written in C++ similar in functionality to APR. It is widely deployed in commercial products.
  • commonc++ is a cross-platform C++ class library for systems programming, with much of the same functionality as APR.
  • POCO is a modern C++ framework similar in concept but more extensive than APR.
  • WxWidgets is an object-oriented cross-platform GUI library that also provides abstraction classes for database communication, IPC and networking functionality.
  • KDE Frameworks – used by KDE SC

    • References

    Apache Portable Runtime Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA