Monday Evening Technical Detour
The Lizard Lounge, our Java-based chat room for registered LGF users, is finally fully integrated with the session management code of the rest of the site.
I hear you saying, “Huh?” But this is a Good Thing. It means that if you log in anywhere on the site, you can move to any pages without logging in again, even restricted pages like the Lounge. It’s a Good Thing for the sake of consistency and security, and also for the eventual move to a distributed environment.
Technical details: the old Lounge login system used the built-in PHP session handlers, which store all session data on the server in flat files. In a clustered setup, this won’t fly; so now the Lounge login system is tied in to our overall session manager, which is based on PEAR’s HTTP_Session library, and stores our session data in the MySQL database.