LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support 20

Posted by Bob Silva Mon, 04 Sep 2006 22:45:00 GMT

LiteSpeed Web Server is a commercial product being marketed as "the world's best performing Ruby SAPI and easiest Ruby on Rails application setup". Having used LiteSpeed for over 6 months now and after running my own tests, I agree with that statement whole-heartedly. Being a recent Apple convert, to me LiteSpeed is the OS X of the web server world. Not open source, but it looks and works great and the developers actually listen to what the users need.

LiteSpeed offers a Standard Edition which is free for private and commercial use, the only restriction being that your site can't serve content related to pornography, warez or illegal activities. This is an odd restriction, but I guess it's cool that they stand by their principles.

To keep things DRY, I won't repeat LiteSpeeds feature set here. Instead, I'll "show" you why I choose LiteSpeed and why I think you should give it a test drive as well. I've put together two screencasts for your viewing pleasure. The first will demonstrate just how easy it is to get up and running with LiteSpeed. From installing the server to a fully deployed Rails application in under 4 minutes. Live and uncut. It moves along pretty fast, but I felt it was a good demonstration of the effort the LiteSpeed developers have put into supporting Ruby on Rails. In the second screencast, we'll take a more in-depth look at some of the cool features of LiteSpeed Web Server. Hope you enjoy them, I had fun making them.



Up and Running with Rails in Under 4 Minutes - 3:25 runtime - Flash

LiteSpeed In-Depth - 21:35 runtime - Flash

UPDATE: The screencasts show that you have to copy dispatch.lsapi into your public directory, with the 2.2 release, this requirement is lifted. The ruby-lsapi gem still needs to be installed, but LiteSpeed will handle the dispatching to Rails through their LSAPI automatically.

UPDATE: When running the script to restart LiteSpeed, make sure you run it as a user with root priviledges. So for Mac users: sudo lswsctrl restart

LiteSpeed 2.2 eases Rails Configuration

Posted by Bob Silva Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:22:00 GMT

The guys over at LiteSpeed really stepped it up this time with their support for Ruby on Rails in their newest release of LiteSpeed 2.2. The ability to configure and deploy a Rails site now has its own configuration page in the administration GUI.



Once you define the defaults for RoR applications on your webserver, you can setup and deploy a site in just a few clicks. Prior to the 2.2 release you had several options for getting LiteSpeed to redirect requests to dispatch.lsapi, you could use rewrites or 404 redirects. Now in 2.2 you can just use the new Rails context feature. LiteSpeed will handle the connections to dispatch.lsapi.



Speed plus agility, what a great combination. Check out their Wiki for some quick start instructions on getting up and running with Ruby on Rails on their platform. I'm interested in seeing what performance benefits I will receive with their Enterprise Version running Rails on the new SMP server, hope they offer educational discounts.