mod_rails aka mod_rack aka mod_ruby

[Evan Miller]

Michał Jaszczyk <jasiu85 at ...> writes:

> 
> Hi guys,
> 
> I did a little research on how Nginx supports Ruby/Rails and if I'm
> right, you can only do proxy or FastCGI to make it working. So I
> thought... There's this mod_wsgi module for Python apps which I have
> recently used and I find it really great. Why not do the same for
> Ruby/Rails? I'm a CS student, I'm looking for a subject for my masters
> thesis and I thought that maybe I could create such module. I have
> some questions:
> 
> 1) Do you think that making mod_ruby/mod_rack/mod_rails is a good idea?
> 2) Do you know if someone is already working on something like that?
> 3) Do you think it would be useful?
> 4) Would you/your friends/collegues be happy if you had such a module
> for Nginx? :)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mike
> 
> 

Such a module would be useful as a Mongrel replacement. At one point Zed Shaw 
(author of Mongrel) was considering rewriting Mongrel as an Nginx module. So 
it's not an inherently bad idea.

Performance-conscious setups would use a front-end Nginx process that proxied 
to multiple Nginx/mod_ruby processes.

The question I would ask is: Why is Mongrel insufficient?

If you're looking for an big Nginx-related project, here are a couple other 
ideas:

1. Embed a scripting language for configuration, and make it use non-blocking 
IO (e.g. for LDAP authentication). This has been batted about in various forms 
for some time.

2. Make Nginx work as an HTTP proxy server (not just a reverse proxy). Bonus 
points for caching. HTTP was designed with caching proxies in mind, but very 
few have been written. There's Squid, but I bet Nginx could beat its pants off 
in terms of performance. This project would entail a number of useful sub-
projects, e.g. async DNS and HTTP/1.1 upstreams, that will benefit many Nginx 
users.

Evan