78 | Chapter 2: ActiveSupport and RailTies
There are many ways to serve a Rails application.fcgi_handler.rbcontains the
FastCGI handler (RailsFCGIHandler) that shims between a FastCGI-speaking server
(Apache, lighttpd, or even IIS) and Rails.webrick_server.rbis a server based on
WEBrick that can serve Rails.
But the preferred application server for both development and deployment is Zed
Shaw’s Mongrel.*Mongrel contains its own Rails handler that calls theDispatcher
methods directly, using its own CGI wrapper. Of course, more information can be
found in Mongrel’s source itself.
Further Reading
Diomidis Spinellis’s bookCode Reading: The Open Source Perspective(Addison-
Wesley) offers advice on how to approach large codebases, particularly those of open
source software.
The Ruby Facets core library†is another collection of code that aims to provide util-
ity methods for Ruby. This library covers some of the same ground as the Core
Extensions, but also provides additional extensions.
If you need more complicated manipulations to the English language than the Inflec-
tor class allows, look to the Ruby Linguistics project.‡
*http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/
†http://facets.rubyforge.org/
‡http://www.deveiate.org/projects/Linguistics