Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) update
So you guys are probably still waiting for the release of Passenger, and I’m pleased to say that we’ve been able to include the test results from Dreamhost (thanks Dallas 
) in the first public release that you’ll see within this week. (Hold on just a little longer guys 
, with a bit of luck, Twitter’s results will come in as well prior to the release of Passenger this week).
Instead of writing an elaborate blog post, I’ll keep it concise for the time being as we’re currently getting swamped at Phusion.
Today, after planning to do this for quite a long time now, we went to go see our Operating Systems/Computer Architecture teacher, Ir. Hans Scholten to discuss the possibilities for receiving ECTS for our work on both Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition (our ruby branch containing our garbage collector optimization).
From this, it became clear that our work wasn’t something trivial and Hans elaborated on the possibilities for publishing this work scientifically. Needless to say, we’re more than thrilled about this. After all, we’re “Phusion, the computer science company” right?
All kidding aside though, we do intend on taking Hans up on his offer to write a scientific paper on our work, seeing as this is just too great an opportunity to ignore. With his help, we’re more than confident about the quality of its contents.
Lastly, we’d like to take the opportunity to thank Ryan Bates of Railscasts for creating an excellent screencast on Passenger, and you’ll be able to see this for yourself at the public release of Passenger this week. Needless to say, it totally kicks the *censored* out of our initial screencast .
To all the people that have submitted a voice sample, we’ll be crediting you on the screencast section of the Passenger as well 
.
Hang on in there for just a little longer people , we’re almost there!
Thanks,
Nauhaie said,
April 8, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
Simple question: are you sure it’s such a good idea to fork Ruby?
Why not commit this in Ruby Core? I guess it wouldn’t hurt anyone to save a little RAM!
Hongli said,
April 8, 2008 @ 10:09 pm
Hi Nauhaie. The intention of this fork is to be eventually merged back to upstream. In fact, patches have already been submitted. But because upstream doesn’t respond fast enough, we maintain a fork ourselves for the time being in order to satisfy users’ short term demand for lower memory usage. The website that will be launched will explain this all in detail.
James said,
April 9, 2008 @ 6:36 am
excellent news all round. well done guys. I hope you release before friday so we can experiment at the weekend!
Paul said,
April 9, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
Gah! I really, really thought this was it this time. You guys are killing me! :p
Passenger sounds like it would solve all the problems I have with Rails once an app is deployed. Can’t wait for the release.
Sam said,
April 9, 2008 @ 6:17 pm
You boys tease like gurly men.
JKaplan said,
April 9, 2008 @ 6:31 pm
Just wondering if the release will include documentation that will help the non-sys-admin among us to get going with it.
Thanks,
James
Hongli said,
April 9, 2008 @ 9:00 pm
Hi JKaplan.
Yes, the first release will include full documentation. In fact, we’ve received special praise from Ryan about this.
Chess said,
April 10, 2008 @ 5:40 pm
Please excuse my ignorance but is this something we will need to purchase from Phusion in order to use?
Ninh said,
April 10, 2008 @ 5:51 pm
Hi Chess,
No you don’t, but we would appreciate it if you would. Since we’re a startup company, this is actually our version of ‘hello world’ and it will be released under an open source license. However, since we’re a commercial IT company specialized in computer science, we do however offer professional support on Passenger along with a myriad of IT services (i.e. not necessarily Passenger related!!!) ranging from IT-consultancy to implementation. We’re really proud of this product and would love for nothing more for people to appreciate and use this product as well. Needless to say, your thanks can always be expressed in the form of a donation.
Hope that has answered your question.
With kind regards we are, your friends at Phusion,
Hongli Lai
Ninh Bui
Michael said,
April 14, 2008 @ 9:57 am
Is possible to launch two or more rails applications in the same server?
Hongli said,
April 14, 2008 @ 10:00 am
Yes.