[ANN] Rack 1.1, a modular Ruby webserver interface

[ANN] Rack 1.1, a modular Ruby webserver interface

[Christian Neukirchen]

Hello,

Today, with a few days delay, we are proud to announce the release of
Rack 1.1.

= Rack, a modular Ruby webserver interface

Rack provides a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing
web applications in Ruby.  By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in
the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web
servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called
middleware) into a single method call.

The exact details of this are described in the Rack specification,
which all Rack applications should conform to.

== Specification changes in this release

With Rack 1.1, the Rack specification (found in SPEC) changed in the
following backward-incompatible ways.

* Rack::VERSION has been pushed to [1,1].
* rack.logger is now specified.
* The SPEC now allows subclasses of the required types.
* rack.input has to be opened in binary mode.

== Changes

* January 3rd, 2009: Ninth public release 1.1.0.
  * Moved Auth::OpenID to rack-contrib.
  * SPEC change that relaxes Lint slightly to allow subclasses of the
    required types
  * SPEC change to document rack.input binary mode in greator detail
  * SPEC define optional rack.logger specification
  * File servers support X-Cascade header
  * Imported Config middleware
  * Imported ETag middleware
  * Imported Runtime middleware
  * Imported Sendfile middleware
  * New Logger and NullLogger middlewares
  * Added mime type for .ogv and .manifest.
  * Don't squeeze PATH_INFO slashes
  * Use Content-Type to determine POST params parsing
  * Update Rack::Utils::HTTP_STATUS_CODES hash
  * Add status code lookup utility
  * Response should call #to_i on the status
  * Add Request#user_agent
  * Request#host knows about forwared host
  * Return an empty string for Request#host if HTTP_HOST and
    SERVER_NAME are both missing
  * Allow MockRequest to accept hash params
  * Optimizations to HeaderHash
  * Refactored rackup into Rack::Server
  * Added Utils.build_nested_query to complement Utils.parse_nested_query
  * Added Utils::Multipart.build_multipart to complement
    Utils::Multipart.parse_multipart
  * Extracted set and delete cookie helpers into Utils so they can be
    used outside Response
  * Extract parse_query and parse_multipart in Request so subclasses
    can change their behavior
  * Enforce binary encoding in RewindableInput
  * Set correct external_encoding for handlers that don't use RewindableInput

== Where can I get it?

You can download Rack 1.1 at

        http://chneukirchen.org/releases/rack-1.1.0.tar.gz
                  http://rubyforge.org/projects/rack

Alternatively, you can checkout from the development repository with:

    git clone git://github.com/rack/rack.git
    cd rack && git checkout rack-1.1   # for this release

== Supported web servers

The included *handlers* connect all kinds of web servers to Rack:
* Mongrel
* EventedMongrel
* SwiftipliedMongrel
* WEBrick
* FCGI
* CGI
* SCGI
* LiteSpeed
* Thin

These web servers include Rack handlers in their distributions:
* Ebb
* Fuzed
* Glassfish v3
* Phusion Passenger (which is mod_rack for Apache and for nginx)
* Rainbows!
* Unicorn
* Zbatery

Any valid Rack app will run the same on all these handlers, without
changing anything.

== Supported web frameworks

The included *adapters* connect Rack with existing Ruby web frameworks:
* Camping

These frameworks include Rack adapters in their distributions:
* Camping
* Coset
* Halcyon
* Mack
* Maveric
* Merb
* Racktools::SimpleApplication
* Ramaze
* Ruby on Rails
* Rum
* Sinatra
* Sin
* Vintage
* Waves
* Wee
* ... and many others.

Current links to these projects can be found at
http://wiki.ramaze.net/Home#other-frameworks

== rack-contrib

The plethora of useful middleware created the need for a project that
collects fresh Rack middleware.  rack-contrib includes a variety of
add-on components for Rack and it is easy to contribute new modules.

* http://github.com/rack/rack-contrib

== Installing with RubyGems

A Gem of Rack is available at gemcutter.org.  You can install it with:

    gem install rack

I also provide a local mirror of the gems (and development snapshots)
at my site:

    gem install rack --source http://chneukirchen.org/releases/gems/

== Contact

Please post bugs, suggestions and patches to
the bug tracker at <http://rack.lighthouseapp.com/>.

Mailing list archives are available at
<http://groups.google.com/group/rack-devel>.

Git repository (send Git patches to the mailing list):
* http://github.com/rack/rack
* http://git.vuxu.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=rack.git

You are also welcome to join the #rack channel on irc.freenode.net.
== Thanks

The Rack Core Team, consisting of

* Christian Neukirchen (chneukirchen)
* James Tucker (raggi)
* Josh Peek (josh)
* Michael Fellinger (manveru)
* Ryan Tomayko (rtomayko)
* Scytrin dai Kinthra (scytrin)

would like to thank:

* Adrian Madrid, for the LiteSpeed handler.
* Christoffer Sawicki, for the first Rails adapter and Rack::Deflater.
* Tim Fletcher, for the HTTP authentication code.
* Luc Heinrich for the Cookie sessions, the static file handler and bugfixes.
* Armin Ronacher, for the logo and racktools.
* Aredridel, Ben Alpert, Dan Kubb, Daniel Roethlisberger, Matt Todd,
  Tom Robinson, Phil Hagelberg, S. Brent Faulkner, Bosko Milekic,
  Daniel Rodríguez Troitiño, Genki Takiuchi, Geoffrey Grosenbach,
  Julien Sanchez, Kamal Fariz Mahyuddin, Masayoshi Takahashi, Patrick
  Aljordm, Mig, and Kazuhiro Nishiyama for bug fixing and other
  improvements.
* Eric Wong, Hongli Lai, Jeremy Kemper for their continuous support
  and API improvements.
* Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche for refactoring rackup.
* Brian Candler, for Rack::ContentType.
* Graham Batty, for improved handler loading.
* Stephen Bannasch, for bug reports and documentation.
* Gary Wright, for proposing a better Rack::Response interface.
* Jonathan Buch, for improvements regarding Rack::Response.
* Armin Röhrl, for tracking down bugs in the Cookie generator.
* Alexander Kellett for testing the Gem and reviewing the announcement.
* Marcus Rückert, for help with configuring and debugging lighttpd.
* The WSGI team for the well-done and documented work they've done and
  Rack builds up on.
* All bug reporters and patch contributers not mentioned above.

== Copyright

Copyright (C) 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 Christian Neukirchen <http://purl.org/net/chneukirchen>

Rack is freely distributable under the terms of an MIT-style license.

== Links

Rack:: <http://rack.rubyforge.org/>
Rack's Rubyforge project:: <http://rubyforge.org/projects/rack>
Official Rack repositories:: <http://github.com/rack>
rack-devel mailing list:: <http://groups.google.com/group/rack-devel>

Happy hacking and have a nice day,
Christian Neukirchen
on behalf of the Rack Core Team.

0289477e44262c5067c61cfe13b39d0de2f3f3de	rack-1.1.0.tar.gz
6c18f0e7337d3cb79ca40ad499470582762482f4	rack-1.1.0.gem

Re: Rack 1.1, a modular Ruby webserver interface

[candlerb]

Just a minor point: it looks like http://rack.rubyforge.org/doc/SPEC.html
hasn't been updated yet. It still says:

rack.version:	The Array [1,0], representing this version of Rack.