Zed Shaw is the creator of the Web server Mongrel, among other projects. (InfoQ featured an interview with Zed Shaw on Mongrel and more and an interview with Zed Shaw and Matt Pelletier if Rails is Enterprise Ready).
In this presentation at QCon London 2007, Zed touches on many topics in connection with Ruby web development, deployment, web servers and more. Mongrel is a successful project (particularly considering it's size - 2500 lines of code) and Zed explains its history, why it was created, and what some of the secrets of success are. An example of the latter is avoiding Yak Shaving - i.e. pointless tasks. One way Mongrel avoids Yak Shaving is by being available as a Ruby gem, which takes care of dependencies and makes installation simple. Other aspects discussed are
Zed finishes with a list of areas to focus on for future Mongrel development: Clustering, Sessions, Logging, Caching, and Recovery/Monitoring.
Watch: Zed Shaw's presentation "Mongrel, 2500 Lines, and Economics"
In this presentation at QCon London 2007, Zed touches on many topics in connection with Ruby web development, deployment, web servers and more. Mongrel is a successful project (particularly considering it's size - 2500 lines of code) and Zed explains its history, why it was created, and what some of the secrets of success are. An example of the latter is avoiding Yak Shaving - i.e. pointless tasks. One way Mongrel avoids Yak Shaving is by being available as a Ruby gem, which takes care of dependencies and makes installation simple. Other aspects discussed are
- how Mongrel's parser and its strict handling of protocol specifications helps
- how important good documentation for the server is
- how having a documented API was an advantage for Mongrel
Zed finishes with a list of areas to focus on for future Mongrel development: Clustering, Sessions, Logging, Caching, and Recovery/Monitoring.
Watch: Zed Shaw's presentation "Mongrel, 2500 Lines, and Economics"