A lot of people who snipe at Rails claim that it does not, and can not scale or be used in “production”. The funny thing about this is that I haven’t heard this from people who have tried and just failed miserably (although this will happen, because you can create something that can’t scale very easily. Trust me, I have done it :)
But, we finally have proof. Hani has been biling away at TheServerSide Symposium and said:
I was tremendously pleased by the audience’s responses. It turns out that the majority of TSS attendees:
Do not/will not deploy Ruby On Rails in a production environment (except 2 guys)
This was a shocker. For those that do not know, TSS Symposium is not just a Java show, but an Enterprise Java show. Not only is it Enterprise Java, but its life started out as a portal for all things EJB.
And these attendees aren’t all hacking on Rails?
That shocked me as much as the show of hands for catholic bishops who do not want women to join them on high.
I think that is is great to be skeptical, and I do not believe that “Java is dead” like many on the kool aid elsewhere feel.
There is room for everything. However, saying that Rails isn’t a good solution for anything is wrong. Does it have room to grow wrt helping people with deployment? I think it does. Do I believe in keeping everything in the database and not scaling out caches? No. memcached works great for /., livejournal, and others.
Another interesting tid-bit from the conference was that a panel was asked about “what is cool about Java in 2006″ and “POJOs” and “Ajax” were responses.
Does anyone else think it is ironic that we had to create an acronym for using Objects and keeping things simple? And Ajax is of course not limited to Java.
This too isn’t a bad thing. I wrote before about the boredom of YAFramework. Now we can start getting work done, and sharing real experiences on solving real problems.
Dislaimer: This is not a James Governor posting. There is no need to wonder if I am serious with the title. I am british. I like sarcasm. Don’t make me put “just kidding” at the end of any sarcasm. Oh, and I know it is the lowest form of wit
March 25th, 2006 at 5:37 am
Hani and Java deserve each other.
The silent majority – ROFLMAO!!!
March 25th, 2006 at 9:54 am
I think you see posts like Hani’s because the Rails fanboys compare Rails to Java and say Rails is better period. It’s not. It might be better in a small subset of projects that can be written in Java, but it isn’t a replacement for Java.
Maybe you are in the middle of the road, but most Rails fanboys are at the “all Java sucks” side. Are you surprised that some people come out on the “all Rails sucks” side?
March 25th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Best counter-example based on rails: http://www.penny-arcade.com/
March 25th, 2006 at 11:45 pm
John Smith: You say ‘Most Rails fanboys are at the “all Java sucks” side’. I think that’s a sweeping statement. Like Dion, I am a fan of Rails but I certainly don’t think “all Java sucks” – as I’ve written (see http://squizlog.keithpitty.org/archives/000425.html), I think both Rails and J2EE have their strengths and weaknesses. It’s case of choosing the best tool for the job at hand.
March 26th, 2006 at 7:48 am
Java is a horrible programming language. Ruby is _acceptable_. But Java is much more production-ready, since its been around longer and had better support.
Lets seperate language from implementation. A ruby compiler to the JVM would indeed be much more usefull for real-life productions than the current ruby implementations.
But from a language point-of-view Java, is perhaps the weirdest language on the block. It has crappy abstraction mechanisms, yet enforces what it has to the end. They solved like 10% of these problems with the support of (what they call) generics. Which gives you a kind of poor-man implementation of polymorphism embedded in a language that wasn’t designed to support it in the first place.
Java is all buzz, all marketing. I personally (at this point in time) would recommend people to switch to Mono/.NET so at least they can built and use a framework that isn’t language specific.
Please stop forcing the good programmers that want to use the right programming languages to use crappy languages when they are only one that have descent support and frameworks suitable for scalability.
And no I wouldn’t use Ruby for something that has to be scalable as well. If scalability/support/framework wasn’t an issue all together I would problely use Haskell-Server-Page anyways, rather than the ruby’s middle ground. But I can imagine that HSP would never get that kind of support since about 90% of the script-kiddies that actually land a job at the corps aren’t educated enough to use such technology correctly anyway.
March 27th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Great post Dion, got me to thinking about why everyone is so hung up on language scalability so I wrote up my thoughts on the matter here:
http://gabrito.com/post/will-a-language-scale-wrong-question
March 27th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
> Does anyone else think it is ironic that we had to create an acronym for using Objects and keeping things simple?
You know why? Lots of developers are not that old. They haven’t seen time over time how hype is created and disappears. You can tell them whatever story you like and if it’s well done and “cool”, they will talk about the “next big thing” to all their young friends and how “cool” this new toy is. When they are in this business for 15 years more, then they start to remember and eventually realize that there is nothing new about POJOs.
Another example: go and ask an old hand about virtualization. Nothing new for folks who have been working with mainframes before. In fact it’s a bad sad to see that in this industry a lot of “new ideas” aren’t so new at all. It’s more like a re-play. True innovation is rare.
March 27th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
> Does anyone else think it is ironic that we had to create an acronym for using Objects and keeping things simple?
You know why? Lots of developers are not that old. They haven’t seen time over time how hype is created and disappears. You can tell them whatever story you like and if it’s well done and “cool”, they will talk about the “next big thing” to all their young friends and how “cool” this new toy is. When they are in this business for 15 years more, then they start to remember and eventually realize that there is nothing new about POJOs.
Another example: go and ask an old hand about virtualization. Nothing new for folks who have been working with mainframes before. In fact it’s a bad sad to see that in this industry a lot of “new ideas” aren’t so new at all. It’s more like a re-play. True innovation is rare.
March 28th, 2006 at 7:54 am
It is very interesting to read something like ‘Ruby is not scalable enough’ and ‘Java scales better than Ruby’, etc.
Folks, look around, there is amlost no high load sites in the net which work on Java. (Except .sun.com, maybe) everything else is written in PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby and runs on LiNUX or FreeBSD. No Java.
Even google is not known to use java…
August 7th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Having used Java and Ruby…I’d bet that Java scaled just as poorly compared to C as Ruby does compared to Java currently, in 1998. So look out Java, in about 10 years… :)
-R