Through some reading on the web today, I discovered that we can achieve clean urls without depending on the mod_rewrite. The trick is to set ErrorHandler directive to your php script such as index.php and then you can manipulate the urls at will in your script. It’s however has some limitation, at least in apache that you’ll lost your POST data. Lighttpd, though I’d never try it seem’s to be nice with this trick. Maybe this can be a good reason for me to switch to Lighty. :)

I’m not sure whether this trick will give performance penalty since for every request the server will try to find the requested file first and then fallback to ErrorHandler in this case index.php if none was found. This trick however look’s cool to me since manipulating url in php code is much easier to debug than using mod_rewrite.