Robert McCool | |
---|---|
Born | 1973 (age 50–51) |
Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
Employers | |
Known for | |
Awards | IMSA 2007 Alumni Trailblazer [1] |
Website | www-ksl |
Robert Martin McCool (born 1973), more commonly known as Rob McCool, is a software developer and architect. [2] [3] [4] [5]
McCool was the author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server, [6] later known as the Apache HTTP Server, and until Apache version 2.2, httpd.conf files as distributed contain comments signed with his name. He wrote the first version while he was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was working with the original NCSA Mosaic team. His twin brother, Mike, also attended the university and would join the Mosaic team to work on a port of the Mosaic software to the Macintosh computer. The brothers received their bachelor's degrees from the university in 1995. They went to high school at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (class of 1991) and Robert was awarded its Alumni Trailblazer Award at its inaugural award event during its 20th anniversary celebration on April 20, 2007. [1]
One of Robert McCool's many contributions was in drafting the initial specification of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), in collaboration with others on the www-talk mailing list, and providing a reference implementation of CGI in version 1.0 of the NCSA HTTPd web server. [7] The CGI specification, introduced in December 1993, turned out to be a key element in making the World Wide Web dynamic and interactive.
McCool was an early Netscape employee, contributing to Netscape Enterprise Server (e.g., NSAPI) and other server-side systems.
Later, at Stanford University, he co-authored the TAP [8] and KDD systems for automatic augmentation of human-generated web content. He is also the author of various journal and conference articles pertaining to semantic search, [9] semantic web, [10] [11] and knowledge provenance.
McCool lives in Menlo Park, California.
The Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.
In computing, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program to process HTTP or HTTPS user requests.
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NCSA HTTPd is an early, now discontinued, web server originally developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by Robert McCool and others. First released in 1993, it was among the earliest web servers developed, following Tim Berners-Lee's CERN httpd, Tony Sanders' Plexus server, and some others. It was for some time the natural counterpart to the Mosaic web browser in the client–server World Wide Web. It also introduced the Common Gateway Interface, allowing for the creation of dynamic websites.
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