I've yet to see my concerns properly discussed (how to handle exceptions): <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671437" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671437</a>
It's funny; some of the last work I did in Ruby was getting streaming support into Rack nearly three years ago. <a href="http://technomancy.us/109" rel="nofollow">http://technomancy.us/109</a> It's a shame to see it took so long to make it to Rails.
Besides asset fetching, do any browsers start <i>rendering</i> pages as chunks come in?<p>EDIT TO ADD: ok, so how does this work if you're page has js/jquery code executing on load? (say for js-based navigation and layouts) ... are people gonna see funky stuff before the page is fully loaded and the js is executed?
Has anyone tested how much of a performance benefit is this likely to give? It seems that it would benefit you most if you have a slow page composition layer but generate a lot of static includes like js and css. Arguably in that case you should be using ajax to retrieve the slower bits, or server side caching instead. But maybe i am missing a use case or some measurements that show it is more generally applicable.
Can anyone comment on omitting Content-Length in the response, versus using chunked encoding? Will chunked encoding simply give you more control over when the browser executes the content, or perhaps be more compatible with any proxies in between? Or is it just a matter of being able to reuse the connection afterwards, rather than having to close it?<p>Using a simple CGI script, both methods achieve the same and work in FF and Chrome - chunks sent have their script statements executed, so you can e.g update a progress bar as you render partial content. However, I had trouble getting it to work with gzip; I had to turn off gzip (SetEnv no-gzip in .htaccess) otherwise the whole output was sent at once (this has possible to do with some default compression buffer size setting).
How did it work before with RoR? The whole response was buffered and then sent at once with a Content-Length header?<p>I wonder why "HTTP Streaming" (known since years as "Chunked Encoding") is such a big deal now.