The long road of development....

I released mod_gnutls today. I started hacking on the idea in August 2004, more than 7 months ago. This is the longest any of my open source modules have been under development without a release.

modgnutls is an alternative to modssl. mod_ssl is a giant beast of a module — no offense to it’s authors is intended — but I believe it has fallen prey to massive feature bloat.

When I started hacking on httpd, modssl remained a great mystery to me, and when I actually looked at it, I ran away. The shear ammount code is depressing, and it does not conform to the style guidelines. It was painful to read, and even harder to debug. I wanted to understand how it worked, and I had recently heard about GnuTLS, so long story short, I decided to write modgnutls.

Lines of Code in mod_ssl: 15,324

Lines of Code in mod_gnutls: 1,886

One of the unique features is support for a distributed SSL Session Cache using memcached. If anyone has a cluster of HTTPS servers, and would like a performance boost, I would love some test results.

Right now its not quite a viable alternative to mod_ssl — it mostly needs testing and some serious code reviews. I plan to add full support for SSL Client Certificates in the next version.

I am pretty sure I will release a 0.1.1 in the next week that can compile on the 2.0.x branch. There are a few function renames that force the current 0.1.0 release to require the 2.1.x-dev branch.

It only took 7 months of hacking, but I am happy with the results so far. modgnutls forced me to truely learn about input and output filters like never before. The best way to really understand something is to write it from scratch — and the result is that I now understand modssl and GnuTLS better than before.