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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Like others on here yesterday, I also hoped the big announcement was a corporate sponsorship/hiring of some sort to let Zed just get on with the tech without any hassles.. :-) (Hello VMware?) Ah well, this is still good.

Just one "but":

I believe that Mongrel2 has the chance to break the religious hold that programming languages have on organizations, businesses, and the average working programmer.

Aren't most open source infrastructure and HTTP based projects programming language agnostic? (Incumbents Apache, lighttpd and nginx, for example, as well as proxies like Varnish and Squid.) What's the deeper idea behind this statement that warrants presenting it as a new concept? I'm all for bold attempts to break the status quo but the way I interpret what he's proposing is the status quo..

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Technically, any protocol if it's going to succeed is language agnostic. It'd be retarded to do a language specific protocol unless you're like Erlang and don't have to care about other languages as much.

The difference is Mongrel2 makes this assertion explicit and does everything it can to stay simple but still support languages you need to use. It does this by having a simple base protocol for doing fast async backends with 0MQ or HTTP, and by making the configuration system language agnostic as well.

That means if you run a Perl shop, then you can keep using your existing Perl HTTP setups with Mongrel2, write new stuff as 0MQ where needed, change parts to C++, and write configuration automation for your Mongrel2 clusters in Perl. Or any language. It doesn't care.

Compared to other servers, which still try to embed some specific language or write their own (Node, Varnish VCL), or have some odd config file only they understand, or force you to mod_* install languages, or use FastCGI in some bastard way, or hack up proxy configs to get page caching, ... this makes Mongrel2 much more agnostic.

But more importantly it comes down to the project's philosophy. I have a specific goal that no language will be king, so I'm going to architect the server so that nobody dominates. Same thing I did with Mongrel1 where I refused to let Rails dominate.

One of the things I really like with Tornado is that there's a handful of test apps that ship in every release. This means people learning it always have a definitive, up - to - date demo of the code, rather than relying on some blog from 6 months ago which uses the previous API.

It would be super sweet if your minichat examples in various langages were shipped in the base Mongrel2 package. If you're about to say I should do this myself, you're right, and I might try it once I've finished shipping my app and have time to investigate.

I was actually wondering the same thing, Peter, it's had me thinking I'm missing something obvious. Zed?

If you read until the end of the article, he says:

"I'm also actively pursuing sponsorship and may have some more announcements later."

Sure, and I did. That doesn't change that today's announcement was not what was anticipated.

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