When it comes to web apps, the Ruby community gets it. Rack is a great example of this. What is it? In a nutshell:

Any Ruby web framework now jives great with any Ruby web server. I can scale down from a fully load-balanced production system, to a local Apache, to a quick in-process web server without even thinking about it. I can also add components to the HTTP chain in a snap. Thanks to Rack’s amazing simplicity, it took less than one year to move from Rack 1.0 to widespread Rack compliance. As Sam Ruby put it: I love it when a plan comes together.

.http://www.flickr.com/photos/russmorris/202752043/

Kinetic’s web servers run Phusion Passenger, which is Rack-compliant. Since both Rails and Sinatra are Rack-compliant, I can hook either web framework up to Passenger. Today, my choice is Sinatra for its bare-bones simplicity…perfect for prototyping! But let’s say, six months from now, I also hop on the Rails bandwagon. Thanks to Rack, that hop will be painless.

Or maybe, just maybe, I decide to swap out Phusion Passenger for Unicorn. Or add a caching server to speed up the site. With Rack, I can freely mix-and-match. I love it, it’s plain brilliant.