At this stage, irrespective of how well intentioned the project is, this is vapor ware. Please don't treat software releases like some Justin Beiber concert with hype and and a countdown.
Is there a solid explanation about what exactly is different and how it's better?
Not yet as far as I can find. I saw Laurent Sansonetti (of RubyMotion fame) tweet about it, but whether he’s had a play or not I don’t know. Fabio Akita’s apparently run some benchmarks against the beta ( http://www.akitaonrails.com/2014/10/19/the-new-kid-on-the-bl... ) but seems almost too excited so maybe take that recommendation with a pinch of salt.
Looking at the single review they link to on the site[1], it looks like the major speedup is due to internal response caching, high concurrency comes from non-thread-bound connection pooling, and there are a few other niceties relating to Nginx integration.
hah, I was about to give everybody crap for being ultra-negative when they have a link to their github repo...but that "fork me on github" takes you to some other page asking for an email address or something. That is pretty bad. That bar chart looks great though. :)
No, Rails isn't a web server, its a web framework.
All these are servers that you'd use to run apps built on Rails or other frameworks, not alternatives to Rails.
Of course, Torquebox is a lot more than a web server, so it may be odd that it is included in the comparison. Once we know more about "Raptor", we can discuss the appropriateness of the comparison more intelligently.
Rails is not a web server, you can plug a discrete web server into rails. By default I think it uses WEBrick, but you can also tell it to use e.g. nginx and presumably in the near future raptor.
Is there a solid explanation about what exactly is different and how it's better?