Rack is one of the most important developments in the Ruby web space in the past year. I suspect it’s been slow to get attention because the benefits are a bit subtle. Witness the Rails core team being confused about Rack just a few months ago. So if you don’t get what the deal is with Rack, don’t feel bad - you’re in good company.

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Mongrel, Thin, and every other web application server I’ve ever used all suffer from a similar deficiency: they daemonize too early. That is, they daemonize prior to trying to boot your app, which means any error - even a really obvious, immediate boot problem - will silently feed into the log as the process dies, without so much as a peep on the command line.

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Yesterday I had a chance to tinker around with a new project using Merb, DataMapper, RSpec, and Thin. Merb + Thin means your app serves up pages twice as fast, with half the memory. Merb + DataMapper means your app is threadsafe. RSpec + DataMapper means your tests are completely independent of the database - which means no db:test:prepare step, so the tests run lightning fast and without fragile database dependencies.

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