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Very nice post, thanks! I'm looking at experimenting with Mongrel2 to see if it would be a nice fit at work, where we still use apache2/mod_wsgi (we have modest needs) to interface our Python + CouchDB app. However, we've started adding WebSockets stuff to the system, and it would be nice to run everything in a slightly more coherent matter. We also use ZeroMQ to pump messages around the network (that later get converted into WebSockets frames for web frontend consumption).

- Is mongrel2 getting good development? The latest release was in June, and the latest commit in the canonical repo seems to be from July...

- Is there good support for RFC-version WebSockets yet?

- Is there easy/performant stuff for simple asset serving via mongrel2, or should I use nginx for that?

3 comments

Hey, just a quick reply, that, yes I'm rather busy right now but I still squeeze in time for Mongrel2 and should be getting out a 1.8 beta soon.

1. Zed is coding in bursts, check the develop branch, it is pretty active and a 1.8 is around the corner.

2. The same, in the develop branch, there are still some questions on how to best implement it like which parts must be done by the handlers and which by Mongrel2, but the coders involved are good and very pragmatic, I bet the results will be a high quality implementation.

3. http://notes.ceondo.com is served by the "Dir" handler, that is, direct static files from disc without going through the asynchronous ZMQ based sequence. It is pretty fast.

Of note: There are several of us in #mongrel2 on Freenode, and there are periodic patches from us :).

I've been working on the WebSockets support. I changed the handler <-> mongrel2 interface for websockets a bit, and I think I've reached the right point in the websockets-devel branch. If you are interested in websockets you can check out that branch and see what you think. If I get no negative feedback I'm merging it into the develop branch once I've tested it more