The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache Portable Runtime Project have announced the General Availability of version 0.9.7 of the Apache Portable Runtime, APR, and version 0.9.7 of its companion project, the Apache Portable Utility library APR-util. A corresponding version of APR-iconv 0.9.7, an alternative portable implementation of the 'iconv' library, is released for users without a system iconv implementation.

This version of APR is principally a bug fix release, and is provided only for users requiring APR 0.9 compatibility. Most users are recommended to adopt the latest APR 1.x version to ensure the most comprehensive support access to the latest features and enhancements.

The mission of the Apache Portable Runtime Project is to create and maintain software libraries that provide a predictable and consistent interface to underlying platform-specific implementations. The primary goal is to provide an API to which software developers may code and be assured of predictable if not identical behavior regardless of the platform on which their software is built, relieving them of the need to code special-case conditions to work around or take advantage of platform-specific deficiencies or features.

APR and its companion libraries are implemented entirely in C and provide a common programming interface across a wide variety of operating system platforms without sacrificing performance. Currently supported platforms include UNIX, Windows, Netware, Mac OS X, OS/2, BeOS

The primary core subsystems of APR 0.9 include the following:

• Atomic operations
• Dynamic Shared Object management
• File I/O
• Locks (mutexes, condition variables, etc)
• Memory management (high performance allocators)
• Memory-mapped files
• Network I/O
• Shared memory
• Thread and Process management
• Various data structures (tables, hashes, priority queues, etc)