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Created January 24, 2012 04:51
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rack retrospective

Rack 2.0, or Rack for the Future

Hi all,

As most of you know, I've bene essentially maintaining Rack for the last year or so. During this time, and for a long time before I've been paying close attention to what is working well, and what could do with a change.

Preamble

After a lot of discussion between myself and many community members involved in the framework and web server space (essentially racks two most knowledgable customer groups), I have come to agree with many of their desires. Some of the changes proposed here may raise some controversy. They break away from racks presently "gloriously simple" design in some minor ways. It should be noted that I/we are in no way intending to make rack complex. Most of the proposal can be implemented in clean, idiomatic OO. When you consider the complexity argument, please consider our goals, as racks present "simpler" design simply cannot cover them.

If rack does not move forward in this space, if we don't make some of these changes, we are likely to alienate some significant customers over time. Most notably, I cannot see Rails hanging on to the rack ecosystem unless we start providing (at the design restriction level) for their future goals. Given that even with the present restrictions, the abstraction layer has significant value, and the project has a "Brand" to date, it is valuable to try and deliver this as part of the Rack library. To do so will also avoid a fracture in the community, and hopefully provide a clear ugprade path for all involved parties.

Retrospective

The Good:

  • Micro applications for debugging & testing are trivial to write
  • The SPEC has unified almost all servers and frameworks to a single API
  • The SPEC has been easy to understand for almost all consumers
  • The repository and code base are largely very accessible
  • The core code base has remained relatively small
  • The community has gained traction, and is in a mature phase
  • Key pattern and anti-pattern knowledge has been established
  • The software is being used to power some very major internet sites
  • A lot of thread safety concerns are well addressed by the dup._call pattern

The Areas for Improvement:

  • The relationship between Rack::ContentLength and Rack::Chunked is still hard
  • The enforcement of stack-only scheduling (using the return value)
  • A lack of parent classes, abstracting away pervasive idioms
  • Inability to efficiently do realtime input streaming
  • Difficulty to perform output streaming with some otherwise useful patterns
  • Multipart parser could still do with becoming much more clear
  • Encodings are quite a big mess still, if nothing else, documentation required
  • Constant re-creation of decorators without caching is a performance concern
  • The call-stack based middleware pattern is problematic for optimization
  • The call-stack based middleware pattern is problematic for configuration
  • The call-stack based middleware pattern can be hard to understand
  • rackup is a half-way house, almost ready for production deployment, but not
  • Our sites, documentation, and examples could do with updates / enhancement

Open Questions:

  • Should we go for a big-rewrite, or an iterative approach?
  • Do ContentLength and Chunked really want to be middleware?
  • Can we solve many of the problems by providing a "Context" object?
  • Should we just absorb the patterns from other major frameworks? (req, res)
  • If we create parent classes for middleware, can we still keep ease of use?
  • Can we provide a backward compatible API, or more importantly, should we?
  • Do we want to split SPEC slightly, to provde app and server facing lints?
  • Should we publicly define a class namespace pattern for middleware?
  • Should we add a simple contributor agreement? (implied, not "signed")
  • Should we just expose IOs, or abstract away IO? The latter is better & harder
  • Should we go for a UCS model, specifically targeting utf8? (much easier)
  • How can we better support server configuration, maintaining abstraction?
  • How can we provide better service to our customers? (more maintainers?)
  • Should rackup provide a true production ready service?
  • Should we move to 1.9.x only (would make encodings MUCH easier)

Recommendations:

Approach:

I have had some heated debates on this topic. There is interest from certain customer community members in the idea of a rewrite. I think this origianlly stems from a general lack of interest from the rack core team to address some of their larger concerns. As noted above, having a rewrite, or a new project spawning to do this, we will see fracture in the community. As rails is one of the major interests here, this means such a project would get a certain traction, and a fracture would certainly occur.

I would rather go for an iterative approach, but as major changes are desired / being considered, this will require a clear high level roadmap. We will need to select version numbers in a good, consistent way, and be performing very regular releases to get to our goal. I would recommend, as best as is possible (whilst avoiding too much waterfall), that we try to provide a final SPEC target. This should make the transition easier on the community. An iterative approach is a proven methodology for software development. We need to unfreeze changes to SPEC and the object protocols, without causing too regular breakage.

A backward compatible shim should be quite easy, meaning that we can provide a very simple transition path. I am unclear at this time if it is possible to provide a sound attempt at a limited forward compatible API. Initially, I think the core protocol is possible, but the semantics are not - thus the requirement for change.

Specific goals:

  • Implement non-stack dispatching. (No more @app)
  • Conditional dispatch would rely on a Response object.
  • Make Applications conform to a SPEC, but also provide a "recommended" superclass.
  • Provide a superclass for middleware. this will abstract away common patterns.
  • Some of these patterns may actually be eradicated by non-stack dispatching, if sufficient, this superclass may be unnecessary.
  • Provide full request and response objects at each stage of dispatch.
  • Make request, response, and header objects decorable, contextually, with minimal overhead (memoized inside the original objects).
  • Abstract IOs and provide a full spec for their handling
    • Incoming IO should provide a promise, with both success and error paths
    • Outgoing IO should provide a future, with both success and error paths
  • IOs may also need to be decorable.
  • Sync, Async, and mixed-mode scheduling should be natively supported
  • The core should remain "thread independent" - we don't want to maintain locks, this steps on scheduling requirements, instead, remain idempotent (use context copies, immutable structures (n.b. not freeze), etc). We may need some mutexes on Request and Response for threaded servers. Could be decorated.
  • Expect Encoding.default_internal from applications, binary from servers.

TODO

  • Boot time configurations

    • Provide for boot time introspection of app data for the server, and server data for the app (example, advanced input streaming stuff, etc)
  • Use a single context object instead of request, response. Allows for complex proxy style operations, particularly for hand-me-downs

    • Also unifies the idea of middleware, instead of middleware having to wrangle two different objects.
    • Makes certain classes of arounds easier / simpler
  • Provide for OOB operations in context.

  • Context also allows for dissemination of request-time information, like HTTP version and certain ensuing semantics as supported by the server.

  • Consider adding explicit support for chunked encoding "trailers", in the hope that browsers catch on that it's a good idea (other than Opera and Curl).

  • HeaderHash should preserve the first case, not the last case (performance)

@raggi
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raggi commented Mar 16, 2012

@tilsammans
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Definitely go 1.9 only.

@bbhoss
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bbhoss commented Mar 19, 2012

Also, hello from Reddit.

1.9-only is good for a 2.0 release, the rest of the community seems to be moving this direction for their next-generation releases.

@bai
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bai commented Mar 19, 2012

+1 for 1.9 only. And thank you sir for your awesome work.

@raggi
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raggi commented Mar 19, 2012

haha, from Reddit. wow, people are eager, huh.

@bbhoss
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bbhoss commented Mar 19, 2012

Yeah, we should be seeing meme pictures shortly :)

@yorickpeterse
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Personally I think only supporting Ruby 1.9 and above is a very, very good
thing. We don't want to end up like PHP 4/5 or Python 2/3 and the only way to
prevent that from happening is by moving forward.

One thing I think Rack should not include is anything Rails specific or anything
even close to it. Rack should provide the basics other frameworks/tools can
build on, it should not build those tools. I'm not entirely sure what exactly
the Rails team would be looking for so I can't really comment on it any further.

Last but not least, backwards compatibility in my opinion should be ignored.
These changes will most likely make Rack 2 quite different from Rack 1 and a
compatibility layer with Rack 1 will only complicate things. Having said that
there should of course be compatibility between the various Rack 2 releases :)

@raggi
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raggi commented Mar 19, 2012

Specifically Rails wants to be able to easily do streaming of input and output. This is a good target for everyone.

The fact is, rails is in many ways several steps ahead of other ruby frameworks in some areas of their roadmap.

Do not worry however, I would not "build rack for rails", but they are one of our most significant customers, as such, their voice is weighted appropriately.

@yorickpeterse
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Ah, that does clear things up a bit. And I agree, stream based input/output
would be a good idea for everybody else.

@FooBarWidget
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Inability to efficiently do realtime input streaming

I don't see how this is directly related to Rack. In my opinion, this is an implementation-specific service that the web server provides, and Rack should not require the ability. For example Phusion Passenger 3.2 is going to provide (optionally configurable) true realtime input streaming that does not block the client even if the Rack app is slow.

Difficulty to perform output streaming with some otherwise useful patterns

Agreed. There are some conventions (e.g. in that JBoss-based Rack app server which name I forgot) that state setting Transfer-Encoding: chunked implies the desire to stream the output. It would be good to standardize this.

rackup is a half-way house, almost ready for production deployment, but not

Before addressing this I think one needs to define what Rackup actually is. I have absolutely no clue. Is it a reference implementation of a Rack web server? Is it supposed to be production-ready? If so, why, given that there are already many production-ready Rack servers? Or is Rackup just a wrapper that starts some Rack server that's installed on the system? Is it supposed to be in-process or not?

Boot time configurations

Agreed. I've always found it odd that the Rack version is detectable through env['rack.version']. Ditto for env['rack.multiprocess'] and env['rack.multithreaded']. This implies that the app cannot initialize its environment according to the Rack version and whether the web server is multiprocessed or multithreaded, until the first request comes in. Right now Phusion Passenger solves this by supplying environment variables that contain this information, but usage of ENV ties a single process to a single Rack server implementation. That said, do we even want to support multiple Rack server implementations in a single process?

A few things that your proposal lacks (though I'm not implying that they should be addressed in your proposal):

  • Support for non-HTTP web protocols, like WebSockets.
  • Support for evented web servers. Thin has an unofficial extension for this. Or is this what you mean by "Sync, Async, and mixed-mode scheduling should be natively supported"?

@jimmycuadra
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For some background on Rails's interests in streaming, see the blog post Rack API is awkward by @tenderlove.

@stevenhaddox
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+1 on Ruby 1.9 and. It being backward compatible with Rack 1.0. Make your life as easy as possible with so much to be done. The community understand major revisions may not work with the same APIs as older revisions ;)

@chaffeqa
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+1 ruby 1.9, and I agree with @stevenhaddox that the community on the whole understands the idea of "major" version change (for proof, look at Rails 3). I'm stoked you guys are working on this!

@mbleigh
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mbleigh commented Mar 19, 2012

I would love to hear more about the specifics of non-stack-based dispatching. How would that look? Also love the idea of request and response being available throughout the call.

@jrochkind
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Inability to efficiently do realtime input streaming

I don't see how this is directly related to Rack. In my opinion, this is an implementation-specific service that the web server provides, and Rack should not require the ability.

Right, the problem is that at present Rack interferes with the ability.

@FooBarWidget
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Right, the problem is that at present Rack interferes with the ability.

Are you talking about the rack.input rewindability requirement? It's possible to provide rewindability while allowing streaming. Rack::RewindableInput is just a dumb implementation that doesn't do that.

@markevans
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+1 for Ruby 1.9 only - easier in the long run and no harm in encouraging people to move forward.
Also I wonder if in that case Fibers could be employed to make the async interface even nicer (not sure if this lies in Rack's domain though - just a thought)
Thanks for your great work

@simonc
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simonc commented Mar 20, 2012

One more voice for 1.9+ only ! It's clearly the way to go from now on.

@raggi
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raggi commented Mar 20, 2012

@FooBarWidget fair and good points. I'll include as appropriate when I do the next pass. Regarding thins hack - yes, I know, I wrote it, and yes, that's somewhat what this about.

@markevans - the point is, I want to provide an API that doesn't force any particular style of scheduling. This is a challenging thing to do, but far from impossible.

@foca
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foca commented Mar 20, 2012

I would love to hear more about the specifics of non-stack-based dispatching. How would that look? Also love the idea of request and response being available throughout the call.

@mbleigh I'm assuming something along the lines of the app keeping a list of middlewares and iterating over it. If you use that app in another it just inserts the list of middleware (plus itself) into the "new" app.

@foca
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foca commented Mar 20, 2012

@raggi that campfire transcript link only works if you have access to Rails' campfire room :P Mind to put that transcript in a gist, or explain what's that about? :)

@raggi
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raggi commented Mar 20, 2012

@foca this gist was never supposed to be public, some overzealous invasive person grabbed the url from twitter and pasted it everywhere

@raggi
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raggi commented Mar 20, 2012

that's the reason it reads like a mail at the start, it's going to be a mail..

@foca
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foca commented Mar 20, 2012

Gotcha :)

@hemju
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hemju commented Mar 21, 2012

+1 for >=1.9.3

@hemju
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hemju commented Mar 21, 2012

I don't know how much of an issue this is, but 1.9 is only the syntax, should there be also a statement which Rubies will be treated first class? MRI, JRuby, Rubinius, ...?

@brookr
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brookr commented Jun 15, 2012

I'm fully in support of going ruby 1.9.3+ only. There are good tools available for people to manage their ruby versions, and everyone needs the encouragement to keep upgrading. Same goes for breaking backwards compatibility in Rack 2.0: Do it, explain it, and move forward!

Thank you for all your hard work on this.

@Wardrop
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Wardrop commented Oct 29, 2014

I'm trying to get the ball rolling a potential Rack replacement. I need
input from as many interested parties as possible so we can establish a
solid specification that we can build the support framework and
libraries on top of.

I've just setup a GitHub project which I'm hoping will serve as a decent
platform for collaboration: https://github.com/Wardrop/Rack-Next

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