Maglev unveiled at RailsConf

At the recent RailsConf held in Portland, Oregon a new Ruby implementation of Gemstone was unveiled. 

At it's core, Maglev is a Ruby based virtual machine ( VM) including a full network stack and a bunch of other cool goodies. Allegedly very fast in micro-benchmarks, it remains to be seen what the final product is capable of.

What's interesting to me about the whole project is the fact that it is essentially an object persistence engine - that is, all the objects requested and served by an application are persisted in memory across client-server transactions. The exact opposite of REST if you will ( a stateless or non-persistent client/server model ).

You can read more about Avi Bryant and Bob Walker's presentation of Maglev at the O'Reilly RailsConf site.

If you want to serve thousands of requests whilst handling persistent data for an equally large number of objects, MagLev certainly seems to be the close to the edge of the curve.