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Tuesday Apr 17, 2007

Ruby on rails bites the dust

Interesting post on how twitter has found it hard to scale its ruby on rails infrastructure. While Java EE  is often called bulky (true of EJB 2.x), clumsy(blame it on struts) and such names, ruby and its cousins are often lauded as the silver bullet for all web development problems. Though I've found ruby on rails awe inspiring (first saw it demo'd by Charles Nutter) for rapid prototyping and building lightweight applications, I've always doubted its ability to scale. Contrast twitter's case with the scale that eBay has achieved using servlets, custom connection pools etc., and you'll see why Java is leagues ahead in building large-scale server applications. And we haven't even started talking about the wide range of F/OSS middleware and tools available in the Java ecosystem.

Posted at 11:01AM Apr 17, 2007 by Bharath Ravikumar in Java  |  Comments[4]

Comments:

Hi Bharath Your title is a little over-optimistic, sorry :) I've made more points at the article you linked to, but: if you're trying to say Rails isn't going to solve all your problems out of the box, I'd agree. But ebays 'custom connection pools' are no different to the tweaks Twitter has made. They certainly don't run their whole system on J2EE either. I remember EJB2 and struts, and going to rails from that was a relevation. I've been impressed by glassfish, so maybe it's time to take another look at it. I don't expect that to be a silver bullet either though :)

Posted by Dick Davies on April 17, 2007 at 02:59 PM IST #

Hello Dick, I agree the title is a little overzealous. :-) At the same time, I wasn't suggesting that RoR is going away any time soon. In fact, Java EE alone wouldn't have grown beyond messy struts and EJB 2.x to its current state (ever tried netBeans 5.5.1's JPA integration for CRUD apps?) if not for the healthy competition with dynamic languages. We do need all the options we can get. Choice is good. The point I'm trying to make is RoR is no panacea and in fact has a lot of catching up to do on the scalability front. (No debates on whether multithreading works better than multiprocessing.) Of course, we could have the best of both worlds with JRuby - which again may not be a silver bullet. Having said that, I'd still retain the title of the post. :-)

Posted by Bharath R on April 17, 2007 at 06:07 PM IST #

The trouble with these kind of discussions (actually with all human interactions) is its always the zealots who shout the loudest. Cheers :)

Posted by Dick Davies on April 17, 2007 at 06:26 PM IST #

Agreed. And the engineering community would've been a less interesting place with only moderates around. :-)

Posted by Bharath R on April 17, 2007 at 09:44 PM IST #

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