teaching Rack to communicate over SPDY instead of HTTP

teaching Rack to communicate over SPDY instead of HTTP

[Benjamin Wagener]

Hello everyone,

I would like to use Ruby on Rails with SPDY. Therefore I have some
questions:
* Is it possible to teach Rack to use an other protocol than HTTP
without completely rebuilding it?
* If it is possible to change the protocol, do you think it would be
realistic viable to solve the implementation of the other protocol in
Rack in about two weeks time by a single person?
* If you think this is really possible, where would you start the
implementation or rather what parts of Rack should be considered most?
I would be very thankful for your assessment, because this
implementation should be only a small step in the whole project and
shouldn't take to much time because of that.
Many thanks in advance!
Benjamin

Re: teaching Rack to communicate over SPDY instead of HTTP

[Graham Batty]

Benjamin Wagener wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I would like to use Ruby on Rails with SPDY. Therefore I have some
> questions:
> * Is it possible to teach Rack to use an other protocol than HTTP
> without completely rebuilding it?
> * If it is possible to change the protocol, do you think it would be
> realistic viable to solve the implementation of the other protocol in
> Rack in about two weeks time by a single person?
> * If you think this is really possible, where would you start the
> implementation or rather what parts of Rack should be considered most?
> I would be very thankful for your assessment, because this
> implementation should be only a small step in the whole project and
> shouldn't take to much time because of that.
> Many thanks in advance!
> Benjamin

Rack doesn't really speak any protocols. Rack is an API for interfacing
server software with applications. In order to have a rack app 'speak'
SPDY, all that needs to happen is for a Rack-capable server to be able
to speak SPDY and appropriately call the application.

In fact, in the Rack distribution there are already two non-HTTP
protocol servers: CGI and FastCGI. SPDY is not really any different in
nature than any of these. It supports some advanced features that would
be difficult to work into the 1 request, 1 reply architecture of Rack,
but even that's probably not insurmountable.

There appears to already be a Rack SPDY server, btw:
https://github.com/romanbsd/spdy

I can't make any claims about how well it works, though. If you need
this, you should probably give it a try.

Graham.

Re: teaching Rack to communicate over SPDY instead of HTTP

[Benjamin Wagener]

On 17.06.2011 08:23, Graham Batty wrote:
> Rack doesn't really speak any protocols. Rack is an API for interfacing
> server software with applications. In order to have a rack app 'speak'
> SPDY, all that needs to happen is for a Rack-capable server to be able
> to speak SPDY and appropriately call the application.
> 
> In fact, in the Rack distribution there are already two non-HTTP
> protocol servers: CGI and FastCGI. SPDY is not really any different in
> nature than any of these. It supports some advanced features that would
> be difficult to work into the 1 request, 1 reply architecture of Rack,
> but even that's probably not insurmountable.
> 
> There appears to already be a Rack SPDY server, btw:
> https://github.com/romanbsd/spdy
> 
> I can't make any claims about how well it works, though. If you need
> this, you should probably give it a try.
> 
> Graham.

Thank you very much for your suggestion. When I read the code of Rack I
saw so much HTTP-requests and so on that I thought it would be necessary
to change that for SPDY-compatibility. I also searched for already done
implementations of SPDY-server for Rails but only found the basic server
in ruby by Ilya Grigorik[1]. I will test the other server, but if there
is someone with some more suggestions for this subject, I would still
appreciate very much if you would share them with me.
Thanks again
Benjamin

[1]: https://github.com/igrigorik/spdy