Is Mongrel dead? When I look at http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/wiki/News
the latest news was from close to a year ago, when last version of
Mongrel was released. A look at the tickets shows a rather sad picture
with only two developers “evanweaver†and “luislavena†contributing to
the bug fixes lately.
Please understand that I am not complaining – I just want to know the
situation so that I can make intelligent decision on the long term
viability of Mongrel as an application server. I realize that it is a
community project and if more people (including myself) would put in
more effort things would be different. However, as it stands now, I am
not able to contribute due to the lack of knowledge and time. This is a
normal case of an open source software and, as I said, I am not
complaining. Still, I would like to understand the long term
implications of using Mongrel.
I know there is Phusion aka mod_rails. However, as it stands right now,
the company is not a truly “for profit†company and relies on donations
and consulting in installing mod_rails. Amount of dollars coming in for
installation consulting is probably questionable since installation is
fairly simple. The folks behind mod_rails hit the nail on the head
however, when they introduced “Passenger Enterprise Licenseâ€. Folks
responsible for strategic long term decisions regarding technology need
to be sure that the company won’t be left high and dry when Mogrel
drowns (just look at that picture on http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/wiki -
poor Fluffy is drowining). Rails proved to be a viable framework, that
survived time test (although I would certainly prefer to see less
frequent version releases). However, I am puzzled by the lack of
interest in offering a commercial app server for Rails. There is
certainly room for such a thing. Folks like me would rather pay XYZ
dollars for a license, get phone support, etc. as oppose to get free
Mongrel and keep my fingers crossed that new Ruby patch does not break
it to pieces like it did last year. I know that there is a number of
companies that use Rails regardless. However, the number would be bigger
if there were more commercial tools, especially servers. If you look
into Java world you will see that there is a reason why Weblogic
successfully competes with free JBoss, Tomcat, and Glassfish.
…but I digress… So is Mongrel dead? Is there a commercial app server for
Rails?
TPM
P.S. am intentionally posting this in the Rails forum as oppose to
Mongrel forum or Deployment form, because I would like to hear from a
wider audience and also let the wider audience see this thread. I think
it is very important to the Rails community as it grows and as Rails
tries to be on the par with Java and .Net in large corporations. Some
indication where Ruby / Rails are can be gleaned from here:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html