Only one more week to go!
I’m going to remind you all about the first Cherokee Summit. It will be held next week in Madrid (7-8 May), and I’m really excited about it. We will release Cherokee 1.0, will rub shoulders with many members of our community, and we’ll define the road-map for Cherokee 2.0. I’ll be giving a tech-talk along Jonathan Hernandez, so you know when and where to find me.

I’m sure that meeting many of the developers of Cherokee in person will be the highlight for me.

If by any chance you’ll be in Madrid that weekend, don’t forget to register in time and join us.

It’s gonna be legen… wait for it… dary!

It is no secret that our Cherokee-Project Community has been growing steadily and relentlessly over the last couple of years. In fact, it has been doing so well that we’ve reached a point where holding a conference about the project actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of people have been asking about this, and after a lot of work we are ready to announce our first Summit, to be held on May 7th-8-th.

You can read Alvaro’s announcement, or you can check out the Summit web-site.

Cherokee will be an important topic, but it won’t be the only one. Those will be a couple of days fully dedicated to High Performance and Scalable Web topics, so there’s room for everyone to join in.  We are commited to reaching the 1.0 milestone of Cherokee by then, so we will also have a party to celebrate it.

It’s going to be fun. I’ll be a speaker at the summit and I’m really looking forward to personally meeting many of the members of the project. Thanks to our sponsors we’ve managed to make the event completely free, so don’t forget to register while we still have free spots!

UPDATE: We’ve written a little brochure (~100KB) that can be used to  let your colleagues know about the summit. Do not hesitate to send it to any coworker or friend who would be interested in attending a High Performance and Scalable Web event.

On a previous post I introduced our first Cherokee Project screencast. We were going to wait for a new and improved website before we made them public, but what the hell! Why wait? I’m sure the new Cherokee-Project Screencast Collection will come in handy for many of you.

From here I’d like to thank P.V. Anthony for his invaluable advice on audio production and my old friend Sara Genge for lending her voice to the project (and for her awesome fiction writing, but that is another story).

Alvaro an I have been putting together a screen-cast to show an overview of Cherokee-Admin’s capabilities. It is just an introduction, but I think this kind of thing is really helpful to spread out the word about Cherokee’s multiple merits.

We wanted to brag about our little baby. After all, not every serious web server out there has a killer interface to configure it. Take a look at our Cherokee Web Server introductory screen-cast.

You might want to see it at full screen for readability.

It’s just one of many to come. We’ve got some more planned, so I’ll let you know when they’re ready.

No, don’t worry. I’m not going to play with you and expect you to work for free as my personal advertisement company. I have to recognize that I’m astonished that Microsoft got away with it with all it’s Windows 7 craze, which once again proves that there are lots of guys out there that outsmart me by far. I’m talking about their PR guys, mind you.

If you expect a party kit from us you’ve come to the wrong place. We actually believe our software is so good that it is a prize for its own merits. It has been a while since I last announced one of our releases, mainly because I didn’t have much to add besides what was told on the official announcements. As always, a lot of development effort is being invested in our flag product, and this is something that doesn’t go by unnoticed. This weekend we decided to release Cherokee 0.99.25. As you can tell by the .25 part, lots of fixes and enhancements have been added steadily release after release.

I hope you enjoy it. We’ve tried to update all the documentation for this release, and we’ve automated most of the recipes in our cookbook by adding lots and lots of configuration Wizards, so hopefully you’ll be able to set up anything in a matter of seconds. As always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here are links to download the tarball and the online documentation.

I have talked previously about Cherokee’s MySQL Database Bridge, so I won’t be repeating myself. Check the information about the Cherokee handler module and the recipe for MySQL balancing on our main site if you are interested.

Besides being the fastest implementation of its kind, it is really easy to use and offers a lot of scalability advantages.

For those of you using PHP we’ve finally pushed upstream a wrapper I wrote for this feature. It should facilitate the use of the MySQL Database Bridge: the PHP-MySQL API has been replicated and can be found under dbslayer/mysql_wrap.php in Cherokee’s source tree. It should provide an easy to use method of benefiting from the advantages offered by Cherokee without having to modify your applications. This will definitely be in our next release, so give it a try and tell us about it! ;)

You know those times when you stumble upon a good idea and think it is plain genius?

Alvaro told me about it this morning and I just had to share it with everybody. This is what you will find if you visit http://apache-es.org, a community in Spanish built to talk about Apache and system administration.

The “aviso” part is a warning:

Apache-es.org, the only Q&A site about Apache that is running Cherokee!

As I said: plain genius!

Yesterday we reached yet another milestone in Cherokee’s development towards World Domination. After almost a month of hard work, our newest creation hit the streets. The official anouncement hasn’t even been made yet, but Cherokee 0.11.1 is out in the wild.

Besides our regular bug fixes and performance enhancements, it is shipped with some new features. SSI support was being requested every now and then, the SSL infrastructure has been reworked and the new reverse proxy is working flawlessly. The Windows build is not a reality yet, but great advances have been made towards that end. Cherokee is currently working under Windows, but the admin is not. And it has to be cross compiled, for now. Anyway, we’re one step closer to releasing a binary Windows build ;)

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here are links to download and read the online documentation with tons of new information and recipes. Enjoy! ;)

UPDATE: Link to the official anouncement.

The day has finally arrived. After a lot of hard work, we are finally releasing 0.8. It has improved quite a lot in this time. It is faster, much more stable and has been thoroughly tested and documented, at last!

Unfortunately not everything are good news. After putting in a lot of effort fixing the Windows build, we finally decided to postpone this until 0.8.1 the next major release. It has been too long since the last release, and having so many improvements it doesn’t make much sense to hold the relase back just to offer it simultaneously to all platforms. This was the only thing holding us back beside some bugs that had to be fixed, so now this is our one big remaining task for the next release ;)

This is our best release ever. By far. Improved performance, interface and documentation enhancements and lots of new features: much faster I/O cache, huge FastCGI performance improvement, updates (and binary upgrades) are now handled gracefully with no downtime, the load balancing is better and a lot more. Alvaro just sent the official release note minutes ago.

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here is the download link. Enjoy it! ;)

UPDATE: I’ve just updated the documentation available at the site.

UPDATE: A quick update to fix some minor bugs has been released: Cherokee 0.8.1.

Many users have told us that they would love to have some more documentation about Cherokee. One of the tasks before relasing 0.8 (which is almost ready by now) is documenting.

Yesterday I wrote a small tutorial that will be part of the documentation. It is a simple walkthrough to set up a couple of virtual servers, basic authentication (PAM and flat) and some redirections.

It will be available at the official site as soon as we make the release, at http://cherokee-project.com/doc

Here it is for now. No screenshots and not much styling in my blog, sorry. It’s just a  quick cut&paste. There’s a lot of other stuff I should be documenting instead of blogging ;)

Configuration Quickstart