On Jun 9, 2009, at 6:25 AM, Rick DeNatale wrote: > > On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Marnen > Laibow-Koser<[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Steve Ross wrote: >> [...] >>> along came >>> Phusion Passenger. That's mod_ruby. >> [...] >> >> I agree with everything in your post except this factual error. >> Passenger is also known as mod_rails. > > Although at this point it would be more accurate to call it mod_rack, > since it support rack apps in general, not just Rails >
Right. Sorry about the mod_* reference. Right now, I have a Sinatra and 5 Rails apps running under Passenger. The point is that Passenger runs as a module under Apache, which is one of the most widely used http servers in affordable hosting contexts. For the OP, if you aren't already familiar with the problem that's being solved here, many of the interpretive languages, Perl, PHP, Ruby among them share the limitation of a bit slow to start. Thus when a Web server such as Apache gets a request, it's a two-step process: load the interpreter, then process the script. This is the old CGI model, but it's both slower than mud and resource intensive. The solution was to load the interpreter into a module under Apache (or a DLL under Windows IIS) and then direct that instance to process the script. That made the request/response more of a one-step process because processing the script typically takes a fraction of the time loading the interpreter does. There were significant problems with the original mod_ruby, so people just didn't use it for Web applications, preferring instead to use a variety of different Ruby wrappers that loaded the interpreter and some Rails infrastructure and then served proxied requests back to Apache. Given that mod_php has been around way longer than mod_rails, there has been a version of PHP that performed acceptably for a good deal longer than Rails. That's no longer the case, but there still is an expertise gap, if you will. As was mentioned earlier, plenty of PHP programmers are out there and plenty of good software is written in PHP. And plenty of dreadful software. Most people who try Ruby and Rails simply enjoy programming with them so much more than PHP that they just don't want to go back. I had to maintain some of my old PHP work and found myself in syntax hell. At this point, Ruby does what I expect and I can write expressively. I can't emphasize enough the strength of the testing tools available to the Ruby (hence Rails) programmer. These are so insanely cool that it would be irresponsible not to take them into account when comparing language/frameworks. There's really not much more I can say except to recommend you try creating a simple application with both and see how you feel about the code you're writing. Out of curiosity, why do you ask. (Again, to the OP) Steve --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
