Hello All,

Yet another release of Mongrel proudly pushed out for everyone to review and
comment on.  This time though, I've done up a little website that's *way*
better than the plan Rdoc that used to stand in for the site like a
one-legged leper.

* http://mongrel.rubyforge.net/

As you should already know, Mongrel is a fast HTTP server and library for
Ruby partially written in C.  It supports running Ruby on Rails, Camping,
and Og+Nitro applications as well as featuring a simple API for others to
use in their own frameworks.  Performance is usually much higher than
WEBrick while the features are kept much lower.


== 0.3.1 Changes

* This release fixes a *huge* bug in the Rails support where the
Content-length was very very wrong.  People who had weird problems
downloading images should try this release and let me know the results.

* It features a new command and plugin system (thanks to pluginfactory) with
an initial start and stop command for Ruby on Rails.

* New site that was basically stolen from all sorts of Creative Commons
licensed sources.  Please read the attributions page (
http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/attributions.html) so they get credit.

* Dependency problems with daemons gem solved.


== The New Rails Runner

This release features a mongrel_rails script that has start and stop
commands as well as full options for dictating it's configuration.  Simply
do the following:

 $ sudo gem install mongrel
 $ cd myrailsapp
 $ mongrel_rails start -d

Which runs Mongrel in the background. You can stop it with:

 $ mongrel_rails stop

And youe all set.  You can pass the start and stop commands the -h option
to find out all the possible options.


=== Win32 Folks

The only thing you people need to do right now is avoid the -d option for
start. Win32 doesn support POSIX fork so it wonĄ±t go into the background.
Il be adding support for making Mongrel a service in a few releases.

There might be other Process specific calls the blow up on win32.  Let me
know since..ehem..I didn't really test this on win32.  Sorry.


== The Next Release

I'll be grabbing all the various Rails applications I can and begin testing
Mongrel against them.  If anyone is building an application and is
interested in testing Mongrel with their gear then shoot me an e-mail.
There is one outstanding bug with the Rails support which I have to fix, but
otherwise it's working reasonably well.

Any suggestions for documentation people want are more than welcome.

Finally, I'm looking at a caching mechanism that would involve dynamically
storing gzip and regular versions of all returned content into a memcached.
I have a small prototype kind of working that does this, but I'm interested
in people's ideas for what they'd like in a caching system that's between
Rails page caching and fully dynamic content.


= Love Your Dog?

I'm looking for people who want their buddy featured on the Mongrel site.
Just post a photo via some photo posting site and let me know where it is.
I'll make a page for all the "mongrels" out there.  'Cause dogs rule.


Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/