On: Nginx Unit

[floatboth]

Yeah, Mongrel2 looked like a good idea… but turns out it's kinda pointless. Why talk to your app via HTTP-reencoded-as-ZMQ when you can just talk straight up HTTP? Pretty much all languages have very fast and concurrent HTTP servers these days.

[skrebbel → floatboth]

I thought it was because there's a lot about http that's overhead and/or tough to get right, which can then be delegated to the server.

Also, websockets actually map pretty badly to http, conceptually, and fit zeromq much better IMO.

[goblin89 → skrebbel]

Regarding websockets (admittedly off-topic re Mongrel though), I recently found out about Pushpin[0], which seems to be an elegant way to translate WS into HTTP, should it be of interest to someone. Basically a proxy-server that takes care of accepting either websockets or HTTP on the front, and talking only HTTP on the other side.

[0] http://pushpin.org

[nly → goblin89]

I evaluated PushPin for a project recently but ended up going with Nchan

https://nchan.io/

[jkarneges → goblin89]

Pushpin uses Mongrel2 under the hood to handle incoming WebSocket connections, so not entirely off topic. :)

It's pulled in as a dependency and launched in the background.

[nly → jkarneges]

I thought PushPin was based on Qt?

[jkarneges → nly]

It's multi-process. The core logic is a Qt application, but it delegates the external protocol I/O to separate processes. Mongrel2 handles inbound and Zurl handles outbound (Zurl is a project of ours that is basically the inverse of Mongrel2).

[wink → jkarneges]

Parts of mongrel2 were sadly a solution in search of a problem. Mostly the "let's redo FastCGI via ZMQ". Was still immensely fun working on and with it.