I was always jealous of iruby and ipython, the interactive shells for Ruby and Python. Instead of writing a script and running it through the interpreters you just execute the script line-by-line while you write it.

For debugging this is great. Compare a shell-script against the normal shell usage. It is more a ‘What if I …’ pattern instead of ‘I can write 100 lines of code without testing it’.

PHP was missing a powerful shell for a long time now. I needed one for my team at work and ‘php -a’, the interactive shell of PHP 5.0.x, is still not able to handle basic FATAL errors like ‘Function foo() not found’. So I wrote a php based interactive php-shell

I’m sure you use lighttpd because of performance and scalability, and many of you run php too. I’m please to introduce you another opcode cache for php.

Yes, another.

The preview version is deprecated. please check //trac.lighttpd.net/xcache/wiki/GettingSource to get newer source.

and report problems at //trac.lighttpd.net/xcache/newticket

Many features was introduced into lighttpd 1.4.x series to improve config file handling. But there’s something left undocumented, yet nice feature, for debuging.

See me (Jan) live and in colour at the MySQL UC 2006 in April 24-27 in Santa Clara, CA, USA and two month later again in Chicago, IL, USA at the RailsConf 2006

Kris tells you why this usually a bad idea in his article Serving Images From A Database

1.4.11 got a new module for streaming Flash movie files called mod_flv_streaming. This module allows you to seek in FLV files using the high performance infrastructure of lighttpd.

The wiki knows about bugs and their fixes in 1.4.10. Usually it covers small patches which fix problems discovered after the release.

But more interesting for the future is the section about patches for the current release.

• mod_deflate for compressing dynamic content
• mod_extforward to extract the Host from X-forwarded-for
• the mysqlvhost patches for mod_fastcgi

They will be check in the next ‘feature’ release. If you want to try them out now and test them, feel free to contact the authors of the patches directly.

lighttpd 1.4.10 has been release and fixes the fastcgi and cgi problems of .9.

• CGI should work again
• fastcgi should not result in a crash under high load
• load balancing in fastcgi should work as expected
• broken digest request shouldn’t crash mod_auth

New is

  fastcgi.map-extensions = ( ".php3" => ".php" )
  fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ... )

Links

• 1.4.10 in the wiki
• 1.4.10 for download

I grep through the referer log from time to time to see where lighty is mentioned on the net.

This week I got attracted by these links:

• Jifty and Perl6 are the topic at
  pugs.blogs.com which also rushed through the planetsix.perl.org
• Duncan Davidson publish a series of articles about lighttpd and rails Virtual Hosting Rails Applications with LightTPD and Deploying Rails with LightTPD
• Steve Jobs presented the MacBookPro and macrumorslive used lighttpd to report about it live. justaddwater.dk talks about it is a good idea to use lighttpd for this job.
• On www.vmunix.com was a article about past, present and future of FastCGI, SCGI and CGI
• Kevin Worthington published a new lighty on Windows without Cygwin package for lighttpd 1.4.8
• the.taoofmac.com likes the webdav support of lighttpd and also mentions ipoddisk
• hivelogic.com provides launchd support for lighty for MacOSX users

That’s it for this week.

Or should it be named ‘virtual hosting made easy ?’ Anyway. If your vhosting setup looks a bit more complext like having different options (static only, php support, pre-installed rails apps, …) but a similar setup for each you can’t use the vhosting modules and have to write everything by hand. But there is rescue thanks to includes and variables.