[Web-SIG] Rails pushing FastCGI into megahost

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:11 AM 6/17/2005 -0400, Todd Grimason wrote:
>I think this might be of interest to some here - apparently Dreamhost
>has just rolled out support for Rails (apparently all ruby installs are
>up to date at 1.8.2 - python's up to 2.2.x) via FastCGI. [0]
>
>I don't have an account with them these days, but it was mentioned on
>the Rails list - someone over there (and I'd guess others) had been
>asking them for it apparently. No word yet on performance or
>reliability. I suppose it could be in response to something besides
>Rails, but based on the publicity and explicit listing on their pages
>I'd say Rails was the impetus (well, the promise of $ to be made with
>it).
>
>Anyway - point is - good news for increasing the "deployability" for
>python, ruby, perl, etc. and allowing apps to be written in langs
>besides PHP for clients who can only swing commodity shared hosts. Maybe
>someone here should petition them re: WSGI? Or maybe that's pushing
>one's luck...

WSGI does FastCGI; PEAK in particular has WSGI gateways for both 
single-process and forking multi-process FastCGI, that can run as either 
"external" (you start the process and it listens on a connection) or 
"internal" (the web server starts the process with a socket on stdin).

I believe others have implemented FastCGI gateways for WSGI as well.  It's 
not rocket science, unless you need an extremely reliable setup.  :)