I don't understand what this has to do with MagLev. (And how did it go up in smoke? According to this http://maglev.gemstone.com/status/index.html it seems like it's still being worked on.)
In relation to the comment to which I responded, I think it is a big boost to the Ruby community (especially the Rails community) that Passenger and Nginx are playing nicely with each other.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been so bombastic in my statement that the MagLev claims have "gone up in smoke"...that's just my response to the fact that they have demonstrated some pretty amazing stuff but are a little short on delivery.
To be clear Phusion's release today not only promises on a performance boost for Rails, but it also delivers it.
Everybody is 100% right in pointing out that technically speaking, MagLev and Passenger/Nginx are totally separate technologies to solve separate problems, but the goals are the same in my view (delivering better performance for Ruby apps). So I don't think drawing an allusion to the MagLev promises of increased performance for Ruby is unwarranted in relation to what it would mean to the Ruby community at large.
My reasoning prior to today's announcement? The convenience of the deploy. The fact that I don't have to dive into Ebb/Thin/Mongrel and figure that out (probably easy for 99% of the people on this thread) means more time to think about other things.
It's also exciting from the perspective that I'm interested in seeing what the Ebb/Thin/Mongrel teams are going to do. Competition is great!
I do think it may be a bit premature to call MagLev vaporware though; it was only announced last year, no?
Anyways, thank you for following up, it did help illustrate your point for me.