> While the coming Rack 1.0 has been proven useful for small sites, it
> is by no means sufficient for the requirements of today's Enterprise.
> I therefore propose Rack 2.0, where we adopt several important design
> decisions from J2EE:

> * Rack applications now need to subclass from
>  Org::Chneukirchen::Rack::AbstractApplication and implement these
>  methods: #init, #service, #destroy.  Instead of getting an env hash
>  and returning a tuple, #service now gets two opaque objects,
>  instances of Org::Chneukirchen::Rack::AbstractRequest and
>  Org::Chneukirchen::Rack::AbstractResponse.  To generate output,
>  simply run response.getWriter.println("foo").  Imperative
>  programmers will love it!  Don't forget to #close the writer, though.

> * Rackup, which obviously was just a quick hack, gets converted from a
>  DSL to a proper XML configuration file, for example:

>    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>    <rackup id="hello-rack" version="2.4" xmlns="http://chneukirchen.org/xml/ns/rackup"
>        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
>        xsi:schemaLocation="http://chneukirchen.org/xml/ns/rackup.xsd">
>      <display-name>A Rack 2.0 application</display-name>
>      <filter>
>        <filter-name>ServletMappedDoFilter_Filter</filter-name>
>        <filter-class>tests.Filter.DoFilter_Filter</filter-class>
>        <init-param>
>          <param-name>attribute</param-name>
>          <param-value>tests.Filter.DoFilter_Filter.SERVLET_MAPPED</param-value>
>        </init-param>
>      </filter>
>      <filter-mapping>
>        <filter-name>ServletMappedDoFilter_Filter</filter-name>
>        <url-pattern>/DoFilterTest</url-pattern>
>        <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
>      </filter-mapping>
>      <listener>
>        <listener-class>tests.ServletRequestListener.RequestListener</listener-clas s>
>      </listener>
>      <servlet>
>        <servlet-name>welcome</servlet-name>
>        <servlet-class>WelcomeServlet</servlet-class>
>      </servlet>
>      <servlet>
>        <servlet-name>ServletErrorPage</servlet-name>
>        <servlet-class>tests.Error.ServletErrorPage</servlet-class>
>      </servlet>
>      <servlet-mapping>
>        <servlet-name>welcome</servlet-name>
>        <url-pattern>/hello.welcome</url-pattern>
>      </servlet-mapping>
>      <servlet-mapping>
>        <servlet-name>ServletErrorPage</servlet-name>
>        <url-pattern>/ServletErrorPage</url-pattern>
>      </servlet-mapping>
>      <welcome-file-list>
>        <welcome-file>hello.welcome</welcome-file>
>      </welcome-file-list>
>      <error-page>
>        <exception-type>IndexError</exception-type>
>        <location>/ServletErrorPage</location>
>      </error-page>
>      <error-page>
>        <error-code>404</error-code>
>        <location>/error404.html</location>
>      <error-page>
>    </rackup>

>  This belongs to WEB-INF/rack.xml in the .rar file (see below).

> * To generate Rack application sceletons, a new tool called "raven" is
>  introduced.  Creating a new Rack application is as simple as

>    rvn archetype:create -U                                     \
>     -DarchetypeGroupId=org.chneukirchen.rack                   \
>     -DarchetypeArtifactId=rack-archetype-basic                 \
>     -DarchetypeVersion=1.0                                     \
>     -DremoteRepositories=http://chneukirchen.org/repos/rack    \
>     -DgroupId=org.chneukirchen.rack.hello -DartifactId=hello-rack

> * For deployment, we now use .rar files that contain Rubygems and the
>  stuff generated by raven.  Just stuff everything in there and pay
>  people to deploy it to you.  This will create a whole new Ruby
>  industry.

> I hope you'll enjoy these new features and Rack 2.0 will become
> popular in The Enterprise.

> --
> Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirc...@gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org