Pow is very cool, both from the simplicity perspective AND how they went about implementing it.

For one, they’ve written the server using Node (and the install downloads a bundled version of the node executable) and pow itself is written in coffee-script. From the perspective of avoid issues with most current servers (e.g. passenger where you’re limited to 1 ruby at a time, and mongrel / thin / unicorn where you’re managing on a per-app basis), the Pow approach is quite cool.

In particular, the way they’ve implemented rvmrc support means it’s trivial to develop against apps in a passenger-style workflow (touch tmp/restart.txt to restart, hit the url to start it) whilst working with multiple rubies simultaneously. Whilst I love Passenger (and Passenger stand alone), passenger stand alone isn’t an ideal solution (it’s simple, just not quite at simple imho).

Also, using firewall rules to to handle the apps automatically is pretty neat, although it’d be cool if the app offered the option to setup the default vhost in apache as a reverse proxy as an alternative (although that’d mean your requests going through 3 levels not 2).

This is awesome!

@Roland I’m not afraid of node.js. The code is is very straightforward, and it well suits for the job. I believe Pow is superior to Passenger in development: Pow supports multiple ruby environments, while Passenger doesn’t. Anyways, Passenger builds Nginx, while we get this functionality out of the box with Pow.

Make no mistake, Nginx is a great server, I use it in production. However, I think building nginx every now and then, and building passenger interface just on server start is just another overkill.

Now I understand why @dhh says a MacBook Air is good enough for rails development.

@Sutto I have used Passenger Preferences for quite a while, which does what you want from Pow, but it was not comfortable for me: I always wanted to edit httpd.conf directly, because I completely forgot I have this tool installed :)