Re: FN-FORUM: What's the best development platform for creating Web 2.0 business applications?

date posted 17th November 2007 14:57


On 17 Nov 2007, at 13:47, Gary Short wrote:
>> Hi Gary,
>> I love when people speak without having a faintest idea of what
>> they're saying. Did you encounter any problems with scaling?
>
> Sigh; thanks for jumping in with a personal attack, before you even
> bothered to ask your question.
>
> I stated two things above; one that Rails does not scale well and
> two, it is relatively difficult and expensive to host.
>
> Taking my first point; its only recently that Rails has had the
> ability to access data that's shared across mulitiple databases -
> this, obviously hindered scalling. Also, Rails is a framwork built
> on Ruby which, for the time being, is slow, this also hinders
> scalability.
>
> Now my second point, if you are an ISP look at what you have to do
> to get PHP, say, running on your servers; now compare that with what
> you have to do to get Rails running. Which is easier? Also, that
> extra work comes at a price and so it is (generally) more expensive
> to host a Rails solution than a PHP solution.
>
> These are the reasons I stated that rails is both (relatively) hard
> to scale and expensive to host. If you wish to post back and explain
> why what I have said is not true then go ahead, if you want to post
> another attack, whereby you just trot out the fanboy mantra of "if
> you say Rails is not perfect then you don't have the faintest idea
> of what you're saying" then please, don't bother.
>

Hi Gary,

Sorry if it sounded like a personal attack.. far from it. It came out
from the frustration (not related to this message) of trying for a
week to convince PHP developers that adding another layout of
complexity to the system (just for the sake of using yml files) is not
a good thing. Mea culpa!
Regarding multiple databases, the solution to access multiple
databases has been around for ages [1].
These days Rails is as easy to host as PHP, might be a tiny amount of
extra work but you have a choice of hosting using various setups:
FastCGI, Mongrels (although I won't recommend serving static files
like this), Mongrels balanced with Nginx, Apache, etc. More and more
hosting companies are offering now Ruby/RoR as standard and, having in
mind that Rails is relatively new, it's not bad.

So, I wouldn't say it's hard to scale (especially using Rails 2.0 [2])
and by the time it will need to scale you will most certainly require
a dedicated sysadmin which should be able to install Ruby without any
problem. I did it the other day on a new VPS (Ubuntu) and it's easy
enough.

Sorry if my first reply was rude,
Paul


[1] http://pragdave.pragprog.com/pragdave/2006/01/sharing_externa.html
[2] http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/9/30/rails-2-0-0-preview-release