New Rails-based Webserver-Aptly Named "Thin"
January 5, 2008 by Tris Hussey
Filed under Business
Got word from Ben that one of his developers had just come out with a new Ruby on Rails-based webserver. It’s named "Thin", well because it is. Thin, light, fast. Oh and like really alpha:
More alpha then the Greek letter
This is the first experimental release. If you use this on your production server right now you are stupid, looking for extreme sensations or trying to find a way to get fired.
If you’d like to help, have fun or report a bug, join me in the project Google Group and get the code: Source: Thin – A fast and simple web server « Marc-André Cournoyer’s blog
Gotta love honest geeks. Heri has a much better technical assessment of Thin on MontrealTechWatch than I could ever hope to have. My only thought/question was: could it run off a flash drive? Often you do have the need to run a site "live" but not connected to the Net (conferences, goofing around, you know geek stuff).
You might wonder why would you want to need such a server. There is always the "I just want to see if I can do better than…" reason (generally enough for more programmers), but also a small, light, but powerful webserver can come in handy or times when you want to be able to handle large volumes of traffic, but might not have the hardware to do it.
Those wiser than I in these things will probably correct me, and offer up some better reasons. Still, nice to see the Rails community pushing the envelope.
hey Tris,
thx for talking about my project. I doubt it would be possible to install it on a flash drive, since it would require ruby and some platform specific extensions.
I’d like to add that Thin is a Ruby server, it can serve almost any Ruby framework, not only Rails.
Mongrel (the current de facto choice for a Ruby webserver) as been created 2 years ago and some new libraries have been created since to build faster and more extensible web servers. Thin is just the glue that holds all those great tools together.