Hello all- Forgive me if this has been discussed before- I searched the archives and didn't see anything. Anyway, here it goes-
There is a lot of talk lately about Comet-based applications- that is, web apps that hold connections to the server open for a very long time, to effectively achieve realtime data push from the server to the browser. Currently, there are a few web servers out there that are specially architected to support this- Twisted and Jetty 6 come to mind. The problem with those solutions is that neither of them is natively Ruby/Rails- you have to step into Python-land or Java-land there. What would really be nice is if Mongrel supported long-lived connections by separating the notion of a serviceable request from a thread or process. That is, be able to suspend a request until it is resumed by some other request, or by timeout, a-la Jetty 6's Continuations (they're really nice!). Has there been any thought or discussion to adding such a feature to Mongrel? I realize it probably seems a bit pie-in-the-sky at present, but it could really enable some exciting new types of in- browser applications. Combined with all the innovation that is going into Rails apps now, it could produce some really thrilling applications. I know that there is some talk around about something called "Armageddon", which I believe achieves basically the same end, but requires Flash on the client side to manage the backchannel socket. In any case, the requirements on the server side for tolerating huge numbers of idle connections are similar. Any thoughts or comments are appreciated. Best Regards, Danny Burkes _______________________________________________ Mongrel-users mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users
