Re: [ANN/RFC] LMGTWTY - Web Sockets for Rack+Rainbows!

[Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>]

James Tucker <jftucker@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> Agreed. I'm not saying "must", but I would like to request that if
> you're going to try and support asynchronous models, please do it for
> real, rather than hacking it in the way we're having to in rack / thin
> / flow / etc. The more hacks we end up with, the more people get the
> impression that this is "the right way". As it is, the lack of
> protocol - app layer separation in for example, eventmachine
> applications is appalling, and something from which the community may
> never recover. The same kind of history is about to repeat itself in
> the async + long running cycle web areas - if it hasn't already gone
> past the point of no return.

I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling the current async add-ons in Rack
servers are very hacky.  I'll leave async callback support out of
Sunshowers until we can have an async spec that's as elegant the
rest of Rack.

> Like I say, I could just be too much of an efficiency ideologist. If
> you don't have the demand / desire for it, then you may not have a
> good reason to put the effort in - certainly there's nothing else in
> the middle-ground space that you're filling presently, so I don't
> think you're "losing a significant market" by not doing so. As it is,
> I know of a couple of handfuls of apps either in production or close
> to production doing relatively high load async web work in ruby, and
> those folks seem to have done alright with the nasty hack that is the
> current async.callback and deferrable body apis. Bigger deterrents to
> this area actually exist outside of the web server domain itself, as
> the 1.2+ Thin api works just fine, by contrast, there's no ORM or
> process framework for doing async work well, and the closest thing
> there really is to a "nice" async api in ruby open source at present
> is the sequel monkey patches that Aman published iirc with em-mysql.

Heh, I don't know of a single public site using Rainbows! (in any form)
nor Sunshowers in production, yet.  It's winter right now and probably
not the season for Rainbows! and Sunshowers :)

> P.S. it's late, so i apologise if this is too wordy/vague.

Nope, I pretty agree with everything you said and will look forward to a
Rack 2.0 spec that covers async nicely.  Meanwhile, I'll keep the focus
on 1.9 Fibers since they're largely "good enough".

-- 
Eric Wong