plug VS Rack

Yes, it’s a bit of a magic argument, but it’s the only unhygienic variable introduced with a Plug dispatch:

https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug/blob/main/lib/plug/route...

Everything else is explicitly passed, AFAICT.

Have you read https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug ? Shows you how to do a GET in under 5 mins.

Coming from the Ruby ecosystem, a lot of this played out similarly to how the Rack[1] middleware conventions developed in the early Rails v1 and v2 days. Prior to Rack there was a lot of fragmentation in HTTP server libraries, post-Rack everything more or less played nicely as long as libraries implemented Rack interfaces.

I don't write Rust professionally, but it was a bummer seeing that this seems to be a place that was figured out (painfully) in ecosystems used heavily for web development--Javascript and Elixir have their own Rack equivalents[2][3]. I hope that Tower plays a similar role to unify the library ecosystem in Rust.

1. https://github.com/rack/rack

2. http://expressjs.com/en/guide/writing-middleware.html

3. https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug

If you're not familiar with it, feel free to check the inner workings of Plug in their documentation. For now, the code above is fairly self-explanatory I hope. All we need to know is that we're using the Plug.Router capabilities and exposing an endpoint /bpi which we're going to use to retrieve our data and to show it.

Well if Phoenix came with the ability to use Sqlite I'd definitely like it a lot better for smaller sites. Maybe if Elixir had something like Sinatra. I guess using Cowboy or Plug could work.

Because of its lightweight and Rack-based architecture, Sinatra is great for building APIs, mountable app engines, command-line tools, and simple apps like the one we'll build in this tutorial.

Since you mentioned Sinatra and Rails I assume you're talking about web apps. In that case you want to build a Rack Application. That's where web frameworks' responsibility ends.

I'm thinking about building a website that scrapes release notes from sources like https://community.ui.com/releases, https://github.com/rack/rack/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md, https://developer.android.com/about/versions/13/release-notes etc, and cleans them up & formats into the same format so they can be searched a lot easier.

It seems like the best place to start would be for folks who read HN since we refer to these quite a bit day-to-day to figure out what changes in software, apps, etc. Let's open this up with a few questions:

1. Would you find a service like this useful? Why or why not?

2. What release notes would you want to have formatted into the same thing and why?

3. What features or capabilities would you like to see a service like this do? e.g. would you like to select multiple "products/apps/whatever" and see their release notes in one timeline? Side-by-side? etc. etc. etc.

In Elixir world, Plug is a bit similar to Rack in Ruby. Official documentation describes Plug as:

The spec for Ruby's Rack is another good reference for how a Ruby webserver is expected to work.

You've been around in the Rails world for a while. You know your way around rails. But you keep hearing this word 'Rack' and don't really understand what it is or what it does for you. You try to read the documentation on the Rack Github repository or the Rails on Rack guides, but the only thing it does is add to the confusion.

Begin with writing a rack-middleware. Rack is a standard library for writing a web server. The main structure is simple. Here is an example:

Coming from the Ruby ecosystem, a lot of this played out similarly to how the Rack[1] middleware conventions developed in the early Rails v1 and v2 days. Prior to Rack there was a lot of fragmentation in HTTP server libraries, post-Rack everything more or less played nicely as long as libraries implemented Rack interfaces.

I don't write Rust professionally, but it was a bummer seeing that this seems to be a place that was figured out (painfully) in ecosystems used heavily for web development--Javascript and Elixir have their own Rack equivalents[2][3]. I hope that Tower plays a similar role to unify the library ecosystem in Rust.

1. https://github.com/rack/rack

2. http://expressjs.com/en/guide/writing-middleware.html

3. https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug