= about ServerSide

ServerSide is an HTTP server framework designed to be as fast as possible, and
as easy as possible to use. ServerSide includes a full-featured HTTP server, a
controller-view system and a bunch of other tools to easily create servers and
clusters of servers.

== Resources

* {Project page}[http://code.google.com/p/serverside/]
* {Source code}[http://serverside.googlecode.com/svn/]
* {Bug tracking}[http://code.google.com/p/serverside/issues/list]
* {RubyForge page}[http://rubyforge.org/projects/serverside/]

To check out the repository, just perform:
  
  svn co {http://serverside.googlecode.com/svn/}[http://serverside.googlecode.com/svn/]

== Installation

  sudo gem install serverside

== Usage

Once you have the ServerSide gem installed, you can use the <tt>serverside</tt>
script to control servers. For example:

  serverside start .

will start an HTTP server on port 8000, serving the content of the working 
directory. You can stop the server by running <tt>serverside stop .</tt>

To run the server without forking, use the 'serve' command:

  serverside serve .

== Serving ERb Templates

ServerSide can render ERb[http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/erb/rdoc/] 
templates in a fashion similar to PHP. You can store templates in .rhtml files, 
and ServerSide takes care of all the rest. ServerSide is also smart enough to 
allow you to use nice looking URL's with your templates, and automatically adds 
the .rhtml extension if the file is there.
 
== Serving Dynamic Content

By default ServerSide serves static files, but you can change the behavior by
creating custom {routing rules}[classes/ServerSide/Connection/Router.html].
Here's a simple routing rule:

  ServerSide.route(:path => '/hello/:name') {
    send_response(200, 'text', "Hello #{@parameters[:name]}!")
  }

The ServerSide framework also lets you route requests based on any attribute of
incoming requests, such as host name, path, URL parameters etc.

To run your custom rules, you can either put them in a file called serverside.rb,
or tell serverside to explicitly load a specific file:

  serverside start ~/myapp/myapp.rb

== Running a Cluster of Servers

ServerSide makes it easy to control a cluster of servers. Just supply a range of
ports instead of a single port:

  serverside -p 8000..8009 start .