Rack VS Apache

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

Single-page applications (SPAs) existed before S3, but given that you still had to set up, scale, and maintain servers using something like Apache or NGINX in order to serve them, the advantages for “Ops” or “DevOps” were not so different to running a “real server” with a language like PHP, python, or Java.

Apache(prefork mode) + mod_php.

Simiplicity is nice, but there are reasons why Perl and PHP were the popular choices for web stacks in the early 2000's--they are faster and easier to develop with than C and likely safer than C too.

mod_perl (https://perl.apache.org/) and mod_php (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...) helped to make Apache httpd (https://httpd.apache.org/) the number one web server in the early days of the web.

https://httpd.apache.org/ - Apache2 website

The Apache HTTP Server project was initially launched in 1995 by a group of web developers and administrators who sought to improve upon the existing web server software available at the time. The project has since evolved into a collaborative effort, with contributors from around the world working together to maintain and enhance the server. Today, the Apache HTTP Server is managed by the Apache Software Foundation, a non-profit organization that oversees the development of numerous open source software projects.

Apache websites of friends and acquaintances

Apache: This is the web server that is used in the LAMP stack. Apache is an open-source web server that provides a flexible and scalable platform for hosting web applications.

Install the web server software: Download the appropriate version of Apache HTTP Server for your operating system from the official website (https://httpd.apache.org/). Follow the installation instructions provided in the documentation.

Popular web servers include Apache and Nginx. Apache is the most widely used web server on the internet, and it is known for its flexibility and extensibility. Nginx, on the other hand, is known for its speed and efficiency, and it is often used as a reverse proxy or load balancer.