blog.westarete.com

One thing that bothered me when I started using rails was that there wasn’t a built-in way to verify that your actions are getting the correct arguments. For example, in this typical action:

  def show
    @dog = Dog.find(params[:id])
  end

an exception is raised if the “id” parameter is omitted (e.g. /dog/show rather than /dog/show/5), and you get a rails application error by default. It seemed like there should be a way to declare that this action requires an “id” parameter of type integer, and provide a graceful way to recover if that constraint isn’t met.

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Most of the documentation and writings for mongrel require setting up mongrel with apache 2.2, so that you get the benefit of the mod_balanced_proxy module. However there are an awful lot of production machines out there running apache 2.0.

For small installations, it turns out that it can be quite sufficient to run a single mongrel daemon behind Apache 2.0 and plain old mod_proxy, all on one machine. No, you won’t get high concurrency, and you won’t be able to load balance across machines, but it’s an incredibly simple, stable setup that can have your rails app up and running without mucking around with upgrading your web server or installing foreign RPMs.

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