Giving users the ability to edit their own Apache config file isn't enough to let them set arbitrary FastCGI/proxy/whatever options: they also have to be able to restart the master Apache dispatcher in order to make it reload the config file. Even barring that, (using some ad-hoc FAM or cron-driven auto-restart model) there are all kinds of things you can do inside an Apache config that just aren't appropriate for a shared-hosting level of privileges, such as redirecting other people's vhost traffic to your own service, running an open proxy, etc.
There's been some discussion on the mousehole-scripters list recently about how nice it would be to have a simple "HTTP accelerator" module for Ruby -- i.e., fast C code which took care of low-level connection handling, header parsing and generation, and static content serving, which then passed dynamic code up to the Ruby tier. Alternately, a simple event-driven, rather than blocking-thread-based, HTTP server written in pure Ruby would likely be a significant step up from WEBrick. Having WEBrick in the standard library is certainly a Good Thing -- I've prototyped and demo-ed lots of apps (Rails and otherwise) using it. However, there is a glaring hole between the "enterprise" level of service, ala Apache/FCGI/lighttpd/et. al., and the one-client-at-a-time model that WEBrick supports. Perhaps we've got a target for the next PDX.rb group hackfest? -Lennon _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
