Phusion released Mod_Rails and a gem called Passenger today. I watched the screencast and was a little blown away at how easy it was to deploy a rails app. The most gorgeous part is because its hosted in Apache you can run other nice modules like Mod_Security, without having to use an additional transparent proxy. There are some benchmarks out, and it looks like Passenger edges out Mongrel in most tests. This is very exciting news indeed.
Hopefully I can get some benchmarks out sometime soon!
I had the privilege of attending the Sun labs Open House in San Mateo last week. Sun was showcasing some of its new technologies, which included announcements about new servers, as well as demoing new and existing sets of hardware technology such as the totally awesome Sun SPOT and some really cool research projects. Among those projects were Project Caroline, a new platform for computing, and Project Aura
“Project Aura is a web-scale, open, hybrid recommendation system. It combines similarity based on the information “aura” around the itmes added to it with the social data commonly used to generate recommendations. By doing so, the project aims to solve the “cold start” problem associated with adding new items that are yet unseen by the users. Aura is an open system – any web site can contribute data and any web site can use Aura for recommendations. Users have the right to retrieve all of their data and to remove it from the system.” 1.
Other talks being given were on the future of the data center, the Crossbow network virtualization project, which gives virtual machines line-speed performance with virtually no overhead, and Radia Perlman gave a talk on her vision for a distributed PKI infrastructure. Interesting to learn that the inventor of Spanning-tree is a self-described technophobe.
I’m working on compiling some more notes together, hopefully I’ll have more up soon. Sun is doing some really awesome stuff.
Update: See Boris Mann‘s take on the MySQL Acquisition
1. 2008 Sun Open Labs
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Google’s new AppEngine hosting platform, and some companies like Joyent are being pretty bold in their statements of how they too can host Python applications and give developers a greater amount of control. Joyent seems to be forgetting that providing highly-abstracted platforms is what we want to get to, so if they think that having root access is the only answer to the problem then they’re missing the point. AppEngine isn’t about hosting, it’s about Google providing a framework.
Who else does that?
The platforms are very similar but there are differences. Developers use a framework provided by a 3rd party. With Facebook the user-base already exist and they opt into your application, and with Google they acquire the information as users start using your site. Google also doesn’t necessarily impose a consistent look and feel around the apps that run on its framework. Facebook makes money placing banner ads on their pages – Google will make money placing AdWords on sites. Facebook makes you host your app yourself, but Google will provide that functionality for you. People also mention not being able to move your application after it’s deployed. It’s ‘stuck’ to the framework (which is closed), but so is Facebooks.
So it’s a question for developers: Do you want to write a non-portable app for Facebook, or a non-portable app for Google?
