techno.blog("Dion")

Kris Rasmussen and Andy Holt from Competitious gave a SDForum tech talk on their experience with Rails.

They start out talking about their site Competitious and then jump into things. A few pseudo-quotes:

• “Rails actually scales quite elegantly”
• “Maintainability is an issue…. harder to debug”
• “We chose Rails as I got tired writing configuration code”. The component dream didn’t work out for me in Java
• “We built the first version of Competitious in 3 weeks”
• Problems: refactoring is hard, heavy processes, takes work to make production ready, does not support some complex queries, fetches all the data, all the time, so it is easy to over-query the DB.
• Production check list: use automatic deployment, filter_parameter_logging :password, store session in memory, cache data, make web server store the static files, security reviews (don’t rely on with_scope).
• Acts as everything: acts_as_notable, acts_as_loggable, acts_as_securable, acts_as_taggable, acts_as_mediable
• Biggest performance issue: Waiting on other services: ObjectCache.cache(key, CACHE_TIME) { third_party_stuff } (Alexa goes down a lot)
• Timeouts: status = Timeout::timeout(3) { Net::HTTP.get(url) }
• Asynchronous Polling: startup a new process/thread to communicate with the third party service. Use backgroundDRb (lightweight)
• JavaScript Templates: define_js_template(”our.tmpl”) / render_js_template. Share the view.
• Activity Logging: model: acts_as_loggable :name. controller: Media.with_logging(:user => @current_user) { .. }