From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2004-09-08T08:08:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Mozilla/WEBrick strangeness

Lennon Day-Reynolds wrote:

> Here's the situation: I have a simple webapp hosted under WEBrick. The
> Ruby script that starts it also spawn a browser and sends it to the
> index page.
> 
> In IE 6, this works flawlessly. In recent versions of Firefox and
> Mozilla, I randomly get "Bad Request-Line `'. " errors and broken
> content on static files being requested. (I especially like the three
> characters `'. in the message -- it helps my debugging immensely.)

Do you have a pause in your code or some check to ensure that the server 
is completely up before trying to hit it with a browser?

I have some code that does basically the same thing: kick off 
drb+Madeleine, kick off an instance of WEBrick, the launch a browser.

Each item runs in a thread, but the thread starts are spaced out using 
sleep to help ensure that things are running.

I'm less than thrilled with this, as the amount of time needed for 
either the Madeleine server or WEBrick varies, so I'll see about 
replacing it with something more robust.   But it got me past initial 
issues where server processes hadn't fully kicked off.

I think that IE is more robust in handling slow servers than Mozilla, too.


James