
Mongrel2 - rams
http://mongrel2.org/
======
mpk
Usually when people announce a product and give you little else but a future
feature list, I'm sceptical.

Not with Zed, though.

~~~
tel
This is the exact sentiment that makes me respect the guy. He's an asshole and
loves to complain REALLY LOUD to eat up the attention.

But he's dead sincere when it comes to making things. He's like _why's evil
twin.

~~~
batasrki
Agreed, but for one thing. He IS NOT an asshole, not in real life. He's
actually super-nice. Online he has the asshole persona, but that's it.

~~~
tel
I'm with petercooper. If you act differently online, you're still responsible.
His recent attack on Giles Bowkett was an assholey thing to do even before
considering whether either one of them had a point.

That said, I'm not too worried considering his history with the Ruby
community. I'd still have a better opinion of him if he didn't antagonize them
though.

I'm absolutely certain he's a great guy in person. Asshole doesn't preclude
you from being nice, personable, and even entertaining. Instead I take it to
mean that when the bad side does come out it's nasty.

~~~
zedshaw
I find it bizarre that you can come onto a forum like HN and insult me, call
me an asshole, and effectively slander me and that's quite alright. You're
totally not an asshole at all.

But if I out-rant a dude who compares me to Lady Gaga and tries to kick me
when I'm down for no other reason than to drive traffic to his poorly written
blog and sell more videos, then I'm an asshole?

You have the same double standard all geeks have. You let the blow hards,
pundits, and bullies get away with treating other people poorly, lie, and hype
themselves endlessly, but when someone calls them on it you call them an
asshole or worse.

~~~
tel
You're right. It's easy to talk about people as though they're not people
online, even when you're secretly trying to praise them. I'm usually finding
myself agreeing with you when reading things like that and even loving the
vitriol while wincing.

So I apologize for writing timidly previously. I apologize for standing behind
your back and spreading my opinion in an unbalanced fashion. I made the
classic mistake of forgetting I'm actually in public.

I'll say it to you directly. Zed, I'm glad you stand up for yourself, both
against my clumsy commentary and all the other blowhards who strike at you.
I'm even glad you do it so vocally because it is a damn good story: the
wronged who doesn't go quietly into the night.

The only negative side is that your voice is corrosive and bitter and if it
weren't I'd feel a lot more comfortable about agreeing with you. As it is I
feel like I'm nodding along as the bully takes out that annoying kid who
really just had it coming. It feels good, but society is built on not just
sitting and watching that happen. Worse, I hate that I end up remembering that
feeling whenever I read about any of the cool things you do.

So yeah, I still think you're an asshole. It's unfortunately not what's fair
or what's owed but instead how it looks. I'm sure you're ready to tell me why
I'm wrong, but don't worry because I've already got a truckload of cognitive
dissonance going on. It doesn't help that I think Fret War and Shedding Bikes
and Lamson and Mongrel are all great projects and am completely sure that
you're a great friend to those who earn your respect.

I just see it as the image you've intentionally built for yourself. Starting
with ZSFA and now eking into oppugn.us.

~~~
andrewtj
Zed's writing has generally struck me as being pure larrikinism (especially
under the banner of ZSFA). Unfortunately I'm not sure that there is an
analogue for larrikinsim in American culture and it's not a concept I can
easily explain; there is a subtlety to it that makes it both difficult to
convey and difficult to execute. If you Google it you might be able get an
idea of what it's about and perhaps get a different perspective on Zed's
writing.

------
moxiemk1
I'm surprised that he's doing this... after so much vitriol about the Ruby
(and Rails) community and being "ripped off" with Mongrel, I would have
expected him to never touch it again. Granted, it's written in C, but I'd
expect it to be heavily used with Rails.

That said, its good that he is writing it. The more software is written, the
higher the likelihood that _something_ will be great, and when Zed Shaw's
writing it, it's probably pretty good.

~~~
chuhnk
His primary use case is different for mongrel2 compared to mongrel however its
based off the same HTTP parser and is a webserver so I guess the continuation
seemed appropriate. Being completely written in C its going to be blindingly
fast. I have a feeling it'll surge past unicorn, thin, passenger and
everything else out there once its refactored and past beta.

~~~
davidw
The advantage of Passenger is that it takes care of dynamically allocating
instances of your app, adding them and removing them as needs be. I don't
think Mongrel ever did this: you had to guess at how many instances you might
need and hope for the best. (At least afaik - no one has ever corrected me
when I've said that in the past).

~~~
jfager
I'm not a Ruby guy, so this might be a stupid question, but: why would you
need to run more than a single instance of an app on a given server?

~~~
sandofsky
Ruby 1.8 uses green threads, so running multiple processes lets you use all
your cores.

As mentioned in another post, Rails used to not be thread safe. Right now I'm
running a Rails site in production with multithreading enabled, but I'm sure
many libraries in Ruby are not thread safe.

------
gsiener
Zed is a busy guy!

------
lsb
I like that the configuration language is a sqlite database; sounds far easier
than parsing ini files, for example.

~~~
viraptor
I don't like that idea, because of one simple limit. You cannot diff databases
(easily). Of course you can dump them, make sure the linebreaks are there
between records, make sure they're sorted, etc. etc. But checking the whole
config in or out of a VCS is much more useful in general. It also provides an
easy to browse record of changes.

~~~
zedshaw
I'm aiming for operational understanding of the data model used over being
able to directly work with the config file. If it's a .ini (or other conf)
usually you have no idea how the config maps to internal data structures. It's
a mystery why some stanzas in nginx work on FastCGI but not Proxies for
example.

With a sqlite3 based "config file" you'll be able to use real, turing complete
languages to configure it, create control pannels, distribute the config
reliably, and you can run .schema to figure out how it's structured.

It's also incredibly reliable and has many great features for this kind of
thing.

~~~
viraptor
Isn't the nginx's problem solvable with consistent implementation and complete
documentation too?

I guess running some programming script isn't that bad to configure the server
- but right now, people do a lot of basic operations on configs via shell
scripting which do the deployment. Using bash/sh to interact with sqlite
doesn't sound very inviting.

~~~
zedshaw
Possibly, it's a littler early to tell, but I'm sure I'll make it easy to use
from the shell. Could even be possible to create converters from other config
file formats to the Mongrel2 data model as well.

------
Kilimanjaro
body{margin:0 6em;}

There, ftfy

~~~
stesch
Don't forget

font-family: sans-serif;

Instead of "sans serif".

------
wazoox
Bonus point, it's licensed under AGPL.

~~~
stesch
AGPL is always good for misunderstandings and flame wars. Nice show. ;-)

------
sailormoon
Looks like the project web site also has a custom ticketing system and repo
browser. Why not.

~~~
jherdman
Zed loves Fossil SCM: <http://www.fossil-
scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki>

~~~
experimentor
Fossil SCM is written by D. Richard Hipp. The same great guy behind SQLite.

------
dminor
So is this a rebranding of NoNoSql, or something new?

~~~
dminor
Yikes, -4 for an honest question.

Looks like he renamed NoNoSQL to MulletDB: <http://mulletdb.com/index>

MulletDB uses ZeroMQ and sqlite, and communicates with JSON, so I thought
maybe this was the same project heading in a new direction.

~~~
drats
It's not really an honest question because he didn't bother to click on the
link.

