US-based Ruby on Rails Platform-as-a-Service specialist Engine Yard has introduced a new Ruby web server called Puma. According to its developers, Puma, created as an alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel, is "built for speed and concurrency".

The Mongrel-derived web server works with any application that supports the Rack interface. It processes requests using a C-optimised Ragel extension that provides fast HTTP 1.1 protocol parsing, after which it serves the request in a thread from an internal thread pool. While it was designed to be "the go-to server" for Rubinius, Puma also works with JRuby and Ruby MRI.

Further information about Puma, including a setup guide and benchmarks, can be found on the project's homepage and in the read me file. Puma was originally created in late 2011 by Evan Phoenix, who now works for LivingSocial as an Engineering Director.

Source code for Puma is hosted on GitHub and is licensed under a 3-clause BSD Licence. Puma 1.0 was released on 29 March with the launch of the project's new site, the current stable version is 1.1.1.

(crve)