lighttpd has seen constant development and is currently at 1.4.18, so the project seems to be healthy.

lighttpd 1.4.0 was released in August 2005: about 2.5 years ago and according to lighttpd’s trac, 1.5.0 is still only 29% complete (who knows how accurate this is).

Is anyone still holding their breath for 1.5.0 and mod_proxy_core? Is anyone out there actually counting on deploying their Rails apps on lighttpd at any point?