The Road to Passenger 3

In January 2008, I lamented that the lack of a true mod_ruby was damaging Ruby’s viability on the Web (which led to 100+ posts in the comments section!) but within a couple of months Phusion released Passenger (then known as mod_rails) and Ruby webapp deployment hasn’t been the same since.

Now, Phusion have built up a successful little consulting business (with some seriously big name clients) and are hard at work on Passenger 3. “Ease of use, stability, and robustness” are the keywords, and while performance is still being improved, Phusion seem keen to make Passenger the highest quality solution rather than merely the faster.

Last week Phusion started a series of blog posts giving a sneak peek at the ongoing work and today’s article on Passenger 3’s increased stability, robustness and self healing features should be of particular interest to sysadmins and Ruby developers alike.

A significant announcement in today’s post is that Passenger will support zero-downtime, lossless restarts for both the Web server and your applications. While this feature isn’t groundbreaking in the overall field, if Phusion can deliver such a feature, they’ll be raising the bar for the majority of Ruby webapp developers and sysadmins overnight.

Disclaimer: I am a beta tester of Passenger 3 (though admittedly not as useful a tester as I should probably be )

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