The point I was trying to make is that performance is the biggest issue with Ruby, and that is a hard issue to deny. MagLev was introduced with the promise of delivering this much needed performance.
In relation to the comment to which I responded, I think it is a big boost to the Ruby community (especially the Rails community) that Passenger and Nginx are playing nicely with each other.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been so bombastic in my statement that the MagLev claims have "gone up in smoke"...that's just my response to the fact that they have demonstrated some pretty amazing stuff but are a little short on delivery.
To be clear Phusion's release today not only promises on a performance boost for Rails, but it also delivers it.
Everybody is 100% right in pointing out that technically speaking, MagLev and Passenger/Nginx are totally separate technologies to solve separate problems, but the goals are the same in my view (delivering better performance for Ruby apps). So I don't think drawing an allusion to the MagLev promises of increased performance for Ruby is unwarranted in relation to what it would mean to the Ruby community at large.
For me, the big win of Passenger is freeing myself from manual administration of Rails apps. Any performance gain is secondary to the fact that I can drink beer while I rest assured my apps are being served.
I totally agree with this sentiment...actually I've already decided to use Apache/Passenger for an app I'm releasing (hopefully soon for all to review). Today's announcement is really icing on the cake.
My reasoning prior to today's announcement? The convenience of the deploy. The fact that I don't have to dive into Ebb/Thin/Mongrel and figure that out (probably easy for 99% of the people on this thread) means more time to think about other things.
It's also exciting from the perspective that I'm interested in seeing what the Ebb/Thin/Mongrel teams are going to do. Competition is great!
I'm with you man -- I consider myself a pretty good coder, but I'm a really crummy sysadmin. Trying to figure out how to configure Mongrel correctly has always been the worst part of Rails development for me, so Passenger is a welcome relief.
In relation to the comment to which I responded, I think it is a big boost to the Ruby community (especially the Rails community) that Passenger and Nginx are playing nicely with each other.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been so bombastic in my statement that the MagLev claims have "gone up in smoke"...that's just my response to the fact that they have demonstrated some pretty amazing stuff but are a little short on delivery.
To be clear Phusion's release today not only promises on a performance boost for Rails, but it also delivers it.
Everybody is 100% right in pointing out that technically speaking, MagLev and Passenger/Nginx are totally separate technologies to solve separate problems, but the goals are the same in my view (delivering better performance for Ruby apps). So I don't think drawing an allusion to the MagLev promises of increased performance for Ruby is unwarranted in relation to what it would mean to the Ruby community at large.