I went for rails myself, and agree about Mongrel. It seems like the Rails guys are all anxious to throw the Apache baby out with the bathwater, and spend a lot of time fooling around with dodgy ways of doing things.
For now, I use the mod_fcgid Apache module, and it seems to work ok for what I need.
i heard through the grapevine that zed shaw, the dude who wrote mongrel, is down on it and isn't actively developing it anymore. hopefully someone else will pick up the slack, but i'm afraid that 95% of the folks using ruby+rails are know-nothing newbies (like me). =P
anyone have any experience with lighttpd + rails?
Oh really? Why don't you either stop spreading FUD, or back up that statement with some reality. "heard through the grapevine" - give me a break.
Wow, in light of recent Zed events, I think I owe you an apology! That must be one heck of a grapevine.
I'm not sure why they think "assload of processes + proxy" is so good either, but deploying an assload of mongrels behind the "pound" load balancer is damn easy. Plus, pound is light-weight, fast, and designed to be small so that it can be easily security audited.
All you have to do is install pound, edit the pound config file to tell it how many mongrels you have and what port range they live at (easy), do a "gem install mongrel_cluster", then a "mongrel_rails cluster::configure" and a "mongrel_rails cluster::start".
I know this sounds like a lot of steps, but if you've ever built and configured apache from source you know this is cake in comparison.
Ah, yes, I'll wait here while you go convince a few shared hosting providers to let you do that to their servers.
Touche.
Re:Rails vs. Django
by menloparkbum on Friday August 31, 2007 @02:56PM
(#48866)
what is the preferred way to deploy django these days?
Django is far better thought out, and can be deployed in a very sane manner. A fleet of Mongrels is just an embarrassingly bad way to handle concurrency. "I know, let's write a crappy barely functional web server, spawn a metric ass ton of them, and then balance between them with a proxy. It'll be most leet and super fast! We'll call it a Best Practice. It'll be awesome." In fact, it's fragile, doesn't scale very well, and is complicated to configure. It's also a huge distraction from solving the problem in a sane way--people seem to think "deploying Rails" is solved by this and Capistrano, when really, it's just a new stack of problems.
Otherwise Rails kicks ass, and I like Ruby better than Python (but I'm a perl monger, so I might be brain-damaged into not seeing the beauty of Python). But I do tend to feel like Django is being written by grownups who've got years of development experience, while the Rails folks are making it up as they go along...sometimes going down really poorly chosen paths (I believe Mongrel is an example of this, but I'm no expert).
Then again, I think if I were starting an app from scratch I'd pick Catalyst. But I haven't spent enough time with any of them to know which one is really most productive for the way I work. I think you'll want to try them out, and not take advice from random dudes at news.yc.