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Book Reviews Books Media

Mongrel Shortcuts 53

Posted by samzenpus from the serve-it-up dept.
Simon P. Chappell writes "I'm not normally much of a one for reading and learning out of eBooks, but after a little gentle persuading from my regular contact at the publisher, I agreed to take a look at their Mongrel Shortcut eBook. Mongrel is a pure Ruby web server, and while it is normally associated in most people's minds with Ruby on Rails, it is actually possible to run it standalone, anywhere that you have Ruby. As one who is very firmly in the "dead tree" camp for my choice of reading media, I was surprised to find myself impressed with Addison Wesley's range of Shortcut ebooks; they really are close to the readability of regular books." Read the rest of Simon's review.
Mongrel Shortcuts
author Matt Pelletier and Zed Shaw
pages 106
publisher Addison Wesley
rating 8/10
reviewer Simon P. Chappell
ISBN 0321483502
summary An excellent guide to configuring and using Mongrel.


The obvious market segment for this book is the Ruby on Rails developer who wants to understand more about the server that their application is running on and who would like to take more responsibility for it's installation and ongoing maintenance. A second target audience would be those who are looking for a small, efficient and robust web server. Mongrel, through strict adherence to the HTTP 1.1 specification has stayed small and very resistant to many forms of Internet attacks. There is a demand for that kind of server and this book will help those who need it.

Interestingly, these shortcut books are not available through the normal online bookstores. They are currently only available through www.awprofessional.com/ruby or www.informit.com/shortcuts. I'm not sure of the logic behind this and I wonder if that isn't going to hamper sales efforts.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this is an eBook and as such is supplied as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. There are two big positives for me with this book. The first is that the file has no Digital Rights Management technology. This means that you are free to copy it to your computer, but you cannot share the file with anyone else. This is very reasonable approach for Addison Wesley to take and I applaud them for this. Now that they've shown their trust in us, I just hope that those who purchase this book will abide by those conditions. (Apparently, they don't trust me as much as they trust you, because my copy has "Review Copy Only" on the top of each page! :-)

The second positive with this book is that it's formatted with landscape orientation. This means that the long side of the page runs horizontally and thereby allows the whole page to fit nicely on a standard laptop screen with a very readable text size. Landscape orientation makes for very a clean page layout, a matter of vital importance if you're expecting folks to read it from a computer screen.

As far as the structure of the content, this book eschews chapters in favor of sections. Of course, with no section more than twenty pages long, calling them chapters would have been stretching a point. The nine sections cover about every aspect of using Mongrel that you could hope for in a short book.

The first section introduces the book and explains the formatting used as well as the special little sidebars called "Zed Sez". These are highly opinionated, but very insightful, asides on aspects of Mongrel; they cover reasons for writing it and why it was written the way it was. Section two is an introduction to Mongrel itself, the benefits of using it and the license that it is made available under. Section three works through everything you need to know to get started with Mongrel. Naturally, this includes installing it and basic usage.

Section four covers configuration and the array of command-line options available to the developer or administrator running Mongrel. Section five looks at production deployment and examines a typical deployment. Now, production deployments are an art in themselves, so not every aspect can be covered in a section like this, but it does get you started and presents a not unreasonable approach. Section six explores the options for extending Mongrel. Write your own commands, handlers and plugins; this section will show you how.

Section seven shows how to debug your Mongrel configuration and applications. Section eight looks at performance, another thing that's hard to generalize. Here the emphasis is mostly on gathering data so that you can make meaningful decisions for your own situation. Finally, there is a collection of resources; links for Mongrel, and frameworks that run on it.

In addition to the reasons to like the book that I mentioned back at the start of the review, the book is very authoritative. Having Zed Shaw, the primary author of Mongrel, as the co-author is a powerful help of course. Speaking of Zed, I very much enjoyed his little "Zed Sez" sidebars. To describe his style as "pithy" might be an understatement, but they are certainly very informative and they give interesting insight into the writing of a rising star open-source software package.

For all of the positives, there is no hiding the fact that this Shortcut eBook is only 106 pages long. One of the consequences of this is that there is reduced depth. The material that is in the book is very good, but I know that there were a couple of places where more material would have been very useful. So, if you normally look for vast tomes of ultimate completeness, this might not be a good selection for you.

In conclusion, this seems like a very useful guide for anyone who is starting out to configure and use the Mongrel web server for their Ruby projects.

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Mongrel Shortcuts

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  • Slashdotter writes eBook giving opinion of eBooks.

  • +1 on the "Zed says" notes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) <tom AT thomasleecopeland DOT com> on Monday December 18, 2006 @04:41PM (#17291358) Homepage
    They are indeed one of the nicer parts of the book. One of them says, more or less, "if you're SSH'ing into your server more than once a week, you haven't automated things well enough." So true!

  • Positive Reviews (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18, 2006 @04:42PM (#17291364)
    If you take a look at the reviews Simon has done at http://techbook.info/ [techbook.info] you will see there isn't a negative review among them. So take whatever you read with a grain of salt. This is probably why the publishers keep bugging him to review their books.
  • Its HTTP request parser is C, generated by the Ragel state machine compiler.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Timesprout ( 579035 )
      Maybe thats why they called it Mongrel.
    • Nothing can be _pure_ Ruby. Ruby binds itself to the lowest level architecture it can through C. Hey - it's better than assembler. That'd just create maintenance headaches up the yin-yang: they'd have to write their own implementation on every hardware platform rather than using the standard C ones, and every time the C implementations got an update they'd have to update their stuff by hand.

      C is a language that is low enough level that I see no significant performance hits in abstracting to it over as
      • Mongrel does the ruby equivalent of "dropping down to assembly for the speed critical parts". This makes a difference for some people. For instance it means you need a C compiler or pre-compiled binary for your architechture to install mongrel. This is in contrast to a "pure" ruby lib in which all the lib's source files are in ruby.
    • That's because any sentence that includes the words "ruby interpreter" and "performance" by law must also include the words "dog slow".

      Maybe that's why it's called "Mongrel".

  • Mongrel itself is pretty sweet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) <tom AT thomasleecopeland DOT com> on Monday December 18, 2006 @04:46PM (#17291420) Homepage
    It's supplanted Apache+FastCGI as the preferred way of deploying Rails apps in a very short time and seems to be a much better solution all around. "gem install mongrel mongrel_cluster" sure beats the steps necessary to get FCGI running.

    I wonder how many people have upgraded to Apache 2.2 [blogs.com] in order to get mod_proxy_balancer to balance between Mongrel instances... that's why I did it for indi [getindi.com].
    • I wonder how many people have upgraded to Apache 2.2 in order to get mod_proxy_balancer to balance between Mongrel instances... that's why I did it for indi.

      You might want to have your site check for the availability of javascript, otherwise, you get a rather uninformative code dump in the screen.
    • Don't forget lighttpd+fcgi if you deploy ROR on linux. For a single ROR app it's trivial to set up, didn't try running more. I don't know how it compares to mongrel.
      • Nginx gets my vote for a http server facing onto Mongrel. http://nginx.net/ [nginx.net]

        I'm a .NET dev so having to set up web servers on a Linux box aint my favourite passtime... leave the politics outside, it's my paycheck not yours... but I had a need to test a RoR app I'm working on for both Windows and Linux, which quickly became a decision to make it Linux only... anyhow, pretty much all the options I was chewing my way through were driving me nuts, with nginx being last on the list before saying "screw it".

        Took m
        • >I'm a .NET dev so having to set up web servers on a Linux box aint my favourite passtime... leave the politics outside, it's my paycheck not yours... but I had a need to test a RoR app I'm working on for both Windows and Linux, which quickly became a decision to make it Linux only...

          see, it's not a matter of politics :D
          Thanks for the comment, I hope i'll have never to discuss ror+mongrel+nginx vs lighttpd-fcgi: the tongue's gonna end all knotted up.
      • Indeed, if you're interested in the lighttpd+fcgi approach you might want to check out this article on my blog [wilf.me.uk] which covers virtual hosting multiple Rails apps with lighttpd and also how to make it co-exist with Apache on the same server by using 2 IP addresses.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jarich ( 733129 )
        I ended up using Pound as the load balancer in front of Mongrel. Directions for OS X are http://www.jaredrichardson.net/blog/2006/11/21/#in stalling-pound/ [jaredrichardson.net] but it's fairly close to doing the same on Linux.

  • Web Server Primitives (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday December 18, 2006 @05:17PM (#17291916) Homepage Journal
    There's a difference between a mere httpd (HTTP protocol server) and a "Web Server" that must include one. I wish there were a truly minimal httpd written in very portable code like Ruby, Perl or Java, that could use existing webserver plugins like Apache's and, say, WebSphere's, without modification. Just install (perhaps recompile cross-platform), and get the incremental features. With the same data formats, APIs and even typical bug behavior.

    Why do we have to reinvent the wheel every time we reinvent the car?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nuzak ( 959558 )
      A "truly minimal" httpd that can use Apache modules is hardly going to be minimal. In fact it would pretty much be Apache.

      > Why do we have to reinvent the wheel every time we reinvent the car?

      Because they're web servers, not cars, and frankly the existing standards are either too dinky to provide a common base, or the bigger standards are confined to some other language (like Java) or just are too bureacratic for most uses (virtually anything SOA-related). But I don't see anyone reinventing HTTP, Javas
      • Can you back that up? Is the current Apache without modules (but with interfaces) truly factored to nothing but the required HTTP/1.1 responder? I haven't looked at the code since I distributed one of the early patches (before it was even called "Apache"), but I think it includes more than just the minimum.

        The point of a minimal HTTP server would be to factor out all standards support except TCP/IP (if that) - even HTTP could be a module. I didn't say people are reinventing HTTP/Javascript/HTML, though they
  • I first I thought that it was some kind of platform (written in ruby) for reading ebooks!
  • In conclusion, this seems like a very useful guide for anyone who is starting out to configure and use the Mongrel web server for their Ruby projects.

    Intriguingly, though, the book doesn't appear to cover using Mongrel as a library from Ruby at all. The closest it gets is in "Handlers" in Section 6, but this is still working with the regular Mongrel application rather than Mongrel as a library. Admittedly, many people don't want to use Mongrel as a library, but it makes a great replacement for the slow WEB
  • I wonder how this one compares to its O'Reilly equivalent: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mongrelpdf/ [oreilly.com]
  • From http://rubyforge.org/projects/mongrel/ [rubyforge.org]
    A small fast HTTP server written in (mostly) Ruby that can be used to host web frameworks directly with HTTP rather than FastCGI or SCGI.
  • Mongrel --> Ruby (Rails)

    Medusa --> Python (Zope)

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