sam/harbor — Issue #9: JRuby Upgrade
Author: sam
Created: 2012-02-28 05:28:40+00:00
State: open

Harbor should be upgraded to support the JRuby VM exclusively. This gives us the flexibility to code to a specific web-server (right now I'm in favor of Jetty), give that "old school Rails" flavor of being able to just run `harbor server` and have an environment up, not having to trouble yourself with the //web server flavor of the week//.

Additionally this would let us do fancy/amazing things like:

* In-process compression of zip archives writing directly to socket without delay or blocking the server (multi-threading FTW)
* Writing a Response directly to the socket without the use of buffering through Rack, resulting in a much more responsive feel even on long requests
* Optional in-process FTP integration allowing you to use bcrypt and programmatically control access, file requests, etc within your application

Basically a lot of things that could really move the State of the Art in Server-Side Ruby web applications forward.

The downside is you give up Rack (though it might be possible to preserve compatibility with existing middleware?), but the upside is you make for a simpler development environment that's ready for scale and efficient resource usage right out of the box.