
For many years, Apache has been the de facto standard for Web site and application deployment. The open-source Web server, which was originally created as "a patchy" version of the original NCSA HTTP server, has become a highly modular, and customizable, piece of software that can handle nearly anything that an Web site might require. Nearly every open-source Web developer used Apache -- except for programmers using the Ruby on Rails framework, for whom Apache was a poor fit. Instead, Rails developers typically deployed with lighttpd or Mongrel, using Apache or nginx for the site's static components.
