赖洪礼的 blog

This is my personal blog. For Phusion's corporate blog, please go to http://blog.phusion.nl

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Phusion has recently released a library for robust daemon management. Check it out. Description and tutorials are available on that page.

Magnus Holm blogged about Ruby Enterprise Edition. He, along with some other people on RubyFlow, criticized our workflow. I felt obligated to reply. Unfortunately his blog doesn’t allow comments.

We had already sent this patch to the Ruby core mailing list. Magnus, search the mailing list archives and this blog’s archives if you don’t believe me. We’re providing Ruby Enterprise Edition because upstream is unclear about what they intent to do with the patch. But in the mean time, there exists clear demand for the functionality provided by this patch, and so we’ve chosen to temporarily maintain our own fork.

The eventual fate of Ruby Enterprise Edition is, and has been since the beginning, to be merged back upstream. This is explained on the Ruby Enterprise Edition website, which is currently being worked on. This is also why we have chosen to use git as version control system: so that any changes we make can be relatively easily merged back. This all has been planned since the very beginning.

The reason why we pulled it out temporarily is because we felt that there are improvements to be made. We don’t want people to use a half-baked product, because first experiences are very important.

We are a commercial company, and we’ve never made this a secret. We could have easily chosen not to write/publish any of this at all. And yet we have, and we’re even providing all this to you for free. I’m not sure what your point is. Regarding any kinds of profit that we MIGHT generate, should we apologize for trying to put bread on the table? That kind of defeats the point of being a company right?

Magnus said:

Unfornately, I immediately think of a company which does what ever they can to promote their products. As a programmer, I don’t like promoting. I like code. Hard facts that I can verify. That’s the reason not everybody is satisfied with the demo of MagLev.

Magnus, the code is available, along with promotion. What is the problem? Should we not do any promotion at all?

Finally, Magnus also said:

The strange thing is that Phusion actually produce awesome stuff. Passenger is really neat and simple; Ruby Enterprise Edition looks like a great patch. And I’m pretty sure that they will come up with even more genius products.

Still, I think it’s a little fishy…

So what is the actual complaint?

Hi guys.

RailsConf 2008 was great, and our talk on Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition went really well. Fabio Akita has some pictures of our talk. For other pictures, see Fabio’s .mac gallery!

We promised to release Passenger 2.0 and Ruby Enterprise Edition on the same day. Unfortunately we’ve been too optimistic about Internet access. We’re currently at the airport and we have limited internet access until we are back in the Netherlands (which should be in about 4 days or so), but in the meantime, the Passenger version with Rack and WSGI support has already been pushed to github, so feel free to tinker around with it. We’ve also put the latest Users Guide (with Rack support) online.
Thanks for the support Chad!

We’re trying our best to find a way to push out Ruby Enterprise Edition as well, and ask the hardcopy guys to not release it prior to the moment that we’re able to push it (which should be in about 4 days). This launch will also be accompanied by a site etc… Feel free to blog about it though, and the reason why we’re asking this is because we want to keep the support at Phusion related places. This will prevent any ‘noise’ in communication.

Thanks for the support mateys!

Cheers,
Hongli Lai
Tinco Andringa
Ninh Bui

Passenger 1.0.5 has just been released. Please read the Phusion corporate blog for the announcement and upgrade instructions.

AkitaOnRails had recently interviewed us. The interview covers our company’s background and information about Passenger, among other things. He asked us quite some interesting questions, so we recommend you to read the interview.