In a new post to his blog today Derick Rethans talks about his move to what he calls his "PHP Development Environment 2.0" - an upgrade to some of his sites and servers prompted by an update of the Xdebug website.

I'd heard a lot about lighttpd and decided to give that a try - yes, that meant something that I didn't really know to well was going to run in a production environment. Unlike Apache, with lighttpd PHP doesn't run as a module, but instead you run it out of process with something called FastCGI.

He talks about his transition to this new web server and how he wanted to replace his current setup of having to use multiple static modules for PHP and having to recompile each time he wanted to use one of them. A few scripts later and a few modifications to the lighttpd configuration file later and he had a working installation with multiple versions of PHP running on multiple ports.