pedestal is quite a large project, try to offer a complete solution for building web application in Clojure, from server side to client side, to tooling.
http-kit is a very small and focused library, It just do one thing: talk in HTTP. http-kit need to work together with other libraries like Ring[1] and Compojure[2] to do the server side.
Few good things about http-kit:
1. Very fast and scalable, almost as fast as what you can get from the hardware.
2. Focus, do one thing and do it well, thing about Linux/Unix's philosophy. Personally, I prefer this way of doing software.
I am afraid http-kit is much feature less than SignalR. SignalR provides client side javascript[1], and hubs. http-kit provide non of these. http-kit just provide a way to get a Channel that can be used to push data to client, The Channel can be WebSocket or HTTP (long polling/streaming). IMO, http-kit is more like a unix command line tool, tiny and focus.
Socket.IO[2] is more like SignalR compare to http-kit.
Yes, it's 2.0.0, that's a promise of the API. No API breaks after 2.0.0 get released (It's already released today).
To tell the truth, I, Peter[1], and a few others take more than a month to think and discuss the API, even though there are just few functions to export. We try our best to make it better. In the end, I think, We are quite happy with what we get now: the unified API.
If a very good idea found to do the API, but the API would break, then it's version 3. But version 2 will still be maintained, and any bugs will get fixed. That's the promise.
How about your guy build on top it, I can contribute the whole source code (anyway, it's open source)
The reasons I do so:
1. Rss Reader needs a lot of hardware resources for storing/fetch feeds. A big company have much better resource than I can offer.
2. I can provide some paid support for rssminer's code.
Hi, Rssminer is a personal weekend project, it's open source [1]
I create it because I want to learn how to do one page webapp with Backbone.js, but at the last, I drop backbone, life become much easier.
When writing it, I need an async HTTP Server and Client, so I write one myself, called http-kit[2], it seems that it's more popular than Rssminer.
Rssminer is not feature complete as other ones, It has:
1. Import subscription list from Google Reader
2. Feed reading
3. Keyboard support
4. Fast (the landing page is not very fast, though)
5. Run it yourself, the readme on github has detailed procedure about how to run it locally.
Bug report or pull request are welcome. Let's build a Rss reader we like.
NewsBlur is pretty good. I've used it for a while. I also write my own feed reader: Rssminer. It's not as full-fledged as NewsBlur, but is a much lighter alternative. It's support login with google and import google reader's subscription list.
Maybe you can try to tweak the max allowed open file to a larger value. The default is about 1024, that how you just get 1000(I guess). Jetty is quite good at concurrency, you can double check it.
Why not try Clojure? Your web dev's productivity increase by few times instantly.
Yes. something like long polling do require server capable of maintaining many connections.
http-kit provide `async-response` for this kind of usage: see http://http-kit.org for more detail.
I am the author of http-kit, also one of the authors of delicious China: http://meiweisq.com, trying to do some useful thing for our users (like realtime) with it. :)
http-kit needs a few kilobytes of memory (buffer for parsing HTTP request, maintain state, etc) for a connection.
The thread model used by http-kit: a dedicated thread(server-loop), only doing events IO and parsing, when done, queued the request for a thread poll to take it, thread pool compute the response, queue it for the server-loop thread to write it back to client.
Since epoll and kqueue's readiness selection is O(1), idle connections does not hurt latency at all.
author here:
Java part:
1. Java NIO's performance is amazing: event driven r/w bytes
2. maintain state machine when parsing HTTP from bytes buffer need many local variables, I get used to do it in a C style code.
Clojure:
I like this language. It's brilliant. So I write a fast http server/client for it. Clojure is also write in JAVA, great interoperation
Linux's epoll or FreeBSD's Kqueue is ridiculous scalable. Both http-kit and netty take advantage of it. http-kit is all about HTTP, netty is a general framework.
[1] http://rssminer.net/a#read/281377?p=1&s=newest