to spend a lot of time trying things out, adjusting, and playing to get your site
up and running. On the positive side, if you are looking for a fun experiment,
perhaps as a student running a server just to learn rather than to host vital
content, Yaws could be exactly what you want. Who knows? It is an open
source project, and you might find yourself studying Erlang and contributing
either code or documentation.
Cherokee
The distinguishing feature of Cherokee among the crowd that claims both
speed and lightness is its ease of configuration. Cherokee supports all the big
features, like virtual hosts, CGI, load balancing, and so on. It also includes a
graphical interface for configuration, which makes it unique among all the
options in this chapter. The claim is that you can configure Cherokee without
ever editing a configuration file.
Setting up Cherokee is as easy as installing it on your system and then
opening the Cherokee admin interface by issuing the cherokee-admin-
launcher command as root. The downside is that this assumes you are
running a graphical user interface on the same system as your web server,
which is something most Linux admins do not do. However, fear not. It is
possible to use this interface remotely from a system with a web browser and
terminal access via ssh, using the remote system’s IP address and a specific
port (which is configurable).
The other features of Cherokee are comparable to those of lighttpd and Nginx.
If you like what they offer but want to use a GUI for your administration
tasks, Cherokee is worth a closer look. The end-user documentation available
from the Cherokee site is excellent and should get you up and running easily.
Jetty
If you are hosting a personal WordPress site or a few static HTML pages,
Jetty is not what you need. Jetty is an Eclipse Foundation project that is
written in Java. The Eclipse Foundation exists to provide open source
development tools, software frameworks, and more to anyone who wants to
use them. Jetty is a web server and client. It is a javax.servlet container.
It supports Web Sockets and many other integrations. All of Jetty’s
components are open source and freely available, even for commercial use
and distribution. Jetty is used in products like Apache ActiveMQ
(http://activemq.apache.org/) and Google App Engine