I’ve managed to get my little test server all configured for each path.  This little task involved configuring mod_ruby, mod_perl, mod_python on top of my already standard php. I also had to fire up mod_proxy to mask the jsp directory (which is really going to an apache tomcat server – another box on my network).

You can view the progress as I start building.  Progress is still fairly slow at this moment. But now that all the frameworks are in place and my apache ninja skills have been revived I should be able to kick it up a notch.

I’ve also made a slight change in how I’ll be storing the images in the database.  I’m going to just be doing a plain old base64 encode of the binary data.  I’d much rather just store binary data in the database as a central repository for all paths, but there appears to be some issues with this and the fact that the entire django community hates binary data in a database.  So I’m not going to fight it or waste any more time on it.

As part of my previous post, “things to do this summer,” I’ve decided on a not so clever appraoch to proving to myself that “it’s just a language.”

What do I mean by, “it’s just a language?”  Well, let me tell you. On a regular basis I get asked “do you now [language]?” And my answer is usually something along the lines of “Well, I know of it, I’ve touched it a bit, but never done anything real with it.”  But, since I’m a programmer I usually follow it with “It’s just a language.”  So now I’m going to prove to myself that it is in fact “just a language.”

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Most of the Zend Framework documentation I’ve read recommends a rewrite rule that looks something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule !\.(swf|js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$ index.php


Why not use a more elegant rule that looks like this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php


This rule basically says: If it’s not an existing file, and it’s not an existing directory – pass the request through index.php.

This allows you far more flexibility when you want to host non-framework files, or a whole slew of other media types that are not listed in your apache configuration.