In mod_cml is dead, long live mod_cml I gave some hints about mod_cml going to die soon. With lighttpd 1.4.12 there will be a new module called mod_magnet can attract every request and decide on its further execution.
If you want you implement most of our current modules via mod_magnet, e.g.:
Instead of inventing a new language as I did for the first versions of mod_cml we used lua again. Lua is a simple, performant, light and extensible language. Pretty much what your lighty is for web-servers.
Thanks to the help of the #lua IRC channel especially rici I could implement the basic magnet-engine over the weekend. On http://p.caboo.se/12501 you can see the first version of the code-cache that is giving mod_magnet its performance.
While most of the configuration in lighty needs a restart of the server to get activated, mod_magnet reloads its scripts when you change them. The scripts itself are compliled once and executed on each request. Thanks to the architecture of lua it was very easy to implement the this byte-code cache, mOo had to write a while until his XCache worked nicely with php.
And now ? Try it out, get the 1.4.12 (or the last pre-release) and tell us how you like it.