

MacRuby releases ControlTower - joshus
http://www.macruby.org/blog/2010/09/20/announcing-control-tower.html

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TrevorFancher
Currently, this seems more interesting to me as a GCD[1] technology demo.
Looking at #initialize and #open in the code[2] shows how easy GCD can be to
use. Create a queue and add tasks (in this case as Ruby "do" blocks).

I'm looking forward to someone posting some benchmarks comparing
ControlTower's connections per second and speed to other web servers.

[1]
[http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/snowleopard/gcd....](http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/snowleopard/gcd.html)

[2]
[http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/ruby/ControlTower/trunk...](http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/ruby/ControlTower/trunk/lib/control_tower/rack_socket.rb)

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troyk
This is interesting, but Apply is going to need to show the server space a
little love before people will start to seriously consider OS-X as a server
target -- but they should, because they have a nice cut of developer mind
share and an advantage to leverage (not that they should, but they could) with
iphone/ipad web services

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cmelbye
Yeah, seriously. I can't even imagine how I would use this in production.
Super expensive Xcode + built in apache that probably can't proxy to a backend
server all that easily? It's just too inflexible to be seriously considered.

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tlrobinson
I'm not sure I understand. Xcode is free with OS X. Apache on OS X is just
like any other Apache, it has mod_proxy, etc.

Not to mention you can install Nginx or any number of other web servers.

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cmelbye
Sorry, meant Xserve. Apache can be modified, yeah, but you'd have to edit the
config file manually, bypassing the graphical interface that Mac OS X server
gives you.

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GeneralMaximus
As a Python developer on the Mac, I'm burning with envy.

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kingkilr
Why? It's just as easy to get a Gunicorn server running, and it's not platform
locked the way this is.

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patrickaljord
Does this only run on a Mac? If yes, who would want to use a Mac as a
production web server?

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loewenskind
Why not? It's easy to administer, has administrative capabilities similar to
Linux and it's pretty stable. I'd rather have production Mac servers than
Windows servers personally.

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acdha
It also has no real support, even at the enterprise level[1]. At MacWorld
2009, the _entire_ Mac IT speakers track agreed that their best move had been
switching all of their servers to Linux, hands-down, simply because Apple
isn't interested in being a serious player in the server space. If you're a
small design shop, yeah, an XServe is probably going to be fine but if your
needs are any more serious this is a lot of risk to take for generally more
expensive servers.

[1] Simple example: 10.5.2 broke NFS permissions so non-owners could not write
to files. The phone support could do nothing about this and we had two
choices: wait months for the next fix, patch darwin ourselves and run with a
custom kernel (i.e. completely unsupported), or use a different server. The
situation's not much better on the hardware side.

