--0016e64b96e2f001ba0476e39098 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 *"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated"* Revactor implements an approach to concurrency known as the Actor model. Actors are lightweight concurrency primitives which talk to each other using messages. While it can't provide you the full benefits of Erlang's immutable state and excellent performance, Revactor can provide an easier way of modeling complex I/O problems in Ruby that might be difficult to think about when forced into the inversion of control model used by standard asynchronous event frameworks, such as EventMachine or Rev. Revactor uses the Ruby 1.9 Fibers mechanism to provide (relatively) high performance userspace concurrency for I/O bound tasks. This makes it useful for a number of tasks which are presently somewhat difficult to do in Ruby, such as web spidering and asynchronous web frameworks. Revactor's actor API is loosely shared with two other Ruby projects: the Rubinius virtual machine's actor library (http://rubini.us/) and the Omnibus Concurrency Library (http://rubyforge.org/projects/concurrent/), both authored by MenTaLguY. The syntax of these implementations and Revactor are mostly equivalent, however semantics of these three APIs are only loosely similar and some work will be involved in porting code between them. -- Revactor 0.1.5 is a maintenance release to provide compatibility with Rev 0.3.x, a library it uses for event monitoring. However, it also includes a new feature: Revactor::HttpFetcher provides a concurrent HTTP fetcher library useful for tasks like web spidering, or pretty much any situation where you need to fetch a lot of documents over HTTP and might discover new URLs along the way. This fetcher uses a scatter/gather approach to spreading a fetch queue among as many fibers as you wish, and allows you to continuously add URLs to the fetch queue as they enter the system. You can view the implementation/unprocessed RDoc here: http://github.com/tarcieri/revactor/blob/master/lib/revactor/http_fetcher.rb In production, a single process on a 2.0GHz machine was able to pull down around 10Mbps worth of documents. YMMV, but I would be interested to hear how it performs for other people. Also, check out Rainbows, which uses Revactor and adds async support to the Unicorn HTTP server, and provides something like the Python Tornado HTTP server (http://www.tornadoweb.org/) in Ruby: http://rainbows.rubyforge.org/ -- Revactor Philosophy: http://revactor.org/philosophy Github: http://github.com/tarcieri/revactor Gemcutter: http://gemcutter.org/gems/revactor Rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/revactor/ -- Tony Arcieri --0016e64b96e2f001ba0476e39098--