Ruby - App Server

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Hi,

Which is the best App Server that Ruby comfortably sit and play well?

Mourougan

[Vyas Sanzgiri]

anyone?

[Himalay Majumdar]

I bet on GlassFish

[Michael Sullivan]

Since Ruby is interpreted, you don't need an app server at all to run Ruby scripts. However, if you are building web-applications - you can go with:

Mongrel - the trusted standby
Glassfish - If you want to deploy onto the JVM
Webrick - For development it isn't a bad choice.
Cerise - follows J2EE patterns

[Mourouganandame Arunachalam]

Hmmm... interesting....

Thanks Vyas for activating my query

[Vyas Sanzgiri]

Important to know before I can convince the management

[Raghavan Muthu]

Thats a good post ! Thanks Michael!

[Himalay Majumdar]

Mongrel is a Web Server, not an App Server.
There is also Apache Web Server just like Mongrel for Ruby web applications.

Being a Java guy I am more inclined to Apache, but it seems Mongrel is more popular for Ruby specific web applications.

[Michael Sullivan]

Himalay, fair enough.

Glassfish and Cerise are app servers, Mongrel, Webrick, and Apache are web-servers.

That said, you can use either web or app server in prod deploys of Rails apps, though for Ruby scripts - only the interpreter is needed.

[Raghavan Muthu]

That said, Ruby can fit into both Web and App Servers? What if in case of application container specific stuff is packed into a Ruby based web application? Something similar to Java EE applications, we should go for an App Server then?

[Riccardo Tacconi]

I think that is implicit that if you deploy on the JVM you need to use JRuby not Ruby.

I will use Tomcat 6. I am not sure if I will develop with Ruby or JRuby, and at the time of the deployment I could switch from a Ruby project to a JRuby one only by copying the files.

[Lasse Koskela]

As mentioned by others already, you can deploy Ruby-based web applications on both a "native" Ruby platform or on the JVM.

For the former, the "classic" infrastructure was also mentioned already (Apache + Mongrel) but I'd like to add to that list a couple of web servers that seem to be popular: Thin, Nginx and Lighttpd. In addition to these, Phusion Passenger (an Apache module) has been gaining popularity.

On the JVM with JRuby, I'd probably go for Jetty rather than Glassfish. The main advantages of Jetty compared to Glassfish are that Jetty's a proven web container with good performance and Jetty can be easily embedded into your Java process, making it easy to write integration tests.

[Raghavan Muthu]

That's great. Thanks Lasse!

[Michael Sullivan]

I've heard a lot about Nginx, has anyone used it personally?

[Raghavan Muthu]

I have NOT yet

[Michael Sullivan]

Well, I touched base with a friend of mine who was trying to scale out a simple rails app, and test with something like 1000 concurrent users. Amazon offers a free 50/pay 50+ concurrent user test platform that he uses to get the appropriate count, but he was trying to get gzip compression and far-future expires headers set through Apache... and having a heck of a time.

Instead, he upgraded on his host (hostingRails), and intalled Nginx. Now, he's a pretty savvy Unix guy so keep that in mind. He said that his install, config, use of Nginx was fantastic. Not only did it run extremely fast compared to Apache... but he said most of the performance tweaks he was going for were already setup correctly. He's singing the praises of Nginx, and he's definitely colored me to take a better look.

Good suggestion Lasse!