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iodine ★ 970 55 APPLICATION

Iodine is a high-performance concurrent web server for Ruby applications, built as a wrapper around the C-based facil.io framework. It provides native HTTP/WebSocket/Server-Sent Events support, Rack compliance for serving Ruby web applications, and a built-in Pub/Sub system with optional Redis scaling for horizontal distribution. The architecture follows a master-worker model using multiple processes and threads to handle thousands of concurrent connections, with critical networking components implemented in C for performance and Ruby bindings for developer productivity. Key features include static file serving with gzip and X-Sendfile support, a secure Mustache template engine with automatic HTML escaping, a fast JSON parser claiming 20-90% speed improvements over Ruby's standard library, and TLS support (though marked as having known issues for production use). The server integrates with Rack applications through a custom handler and provides upgrade hooks for WebSocket/SSE protocols via the Rack environment. Pub/Sub functionality uses an engine pattern allowing swap between internal cluster-based and external Redis backends. Entry points include the `exe/iodine` CLI executable and programmatic controls via `Iodine.listen`, `Iodine.start`, and `Iodine.stop`. Data flows involve HTTP requests parsed by the C-based HTTP processor, routed to Rack applications or static file handlers, with WebSocket connections upgraded via Rack's `env['rack.upgrade?']` mechanism. The Pub/Sub system operates independently for real-time messaging across processes or machines. External dependencies include the vendored facil.io C library, OpenSSL development headers for TLS support, and optionally the Redis gem for clustered Pub/Sub.

RATING: 8.3/10 MAINT: active DRIFT: medium
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