

Ask YC : Is Ruby on Rails the holy grail of web programming ? - catalinist

I keep seeing this posts about ruby on rails and it sounds more and more like it's suppose to be the holy grail of web programming. Yet, I don't see many success story's to back it up. Is it going to be a ruby bubble happening soon ? How many projects for YC use Ruby  ? 
======
carpal
I think everyone else has pretty much summed it up.

My answer is: No, but it is closer than anything else. It is a huge stepping
stone towards a truly powerful web applications framework.

Rails won't stop innovating any time soon. There's an absolutely enormous
amount of innovation going on in Rails plugins / RubyGems. Eventually the
different plugin/gem approaches to common problems will become standardized,
and those standardized approaches will make it to Rails core.

Once Rails core has all of these awesome things standardized (multi-stage
deployment, more "ruby-like" templates (ERB replacement), fixtures
replacement, automatic generation of integration tests, better caching, etc),
it will become both great and a bloated piece of crap.

Then, another platform emerges that does to Rails what Rails did to PHP. It
will take all of the features of Rails+Bloat, and put it in a sexy package.
Then, THAT will be the holy grail.

At least until the cycle happens again.

------
pg
Only if the evolution of programming languages has stopped.

------
mrtron
Clearly, the answer is no. It is not the holy grail of web programming.

Is it a step in the right direction? Absolutely.

------
raju
There are a few success stories out there using Rails, starting with, of
course 37Signals themselves, and Twitter. Rails has gotten a lot of publicity
and there are more than a few Ruby fans out there.

I would not call it a holy grail. There has been the growth of several
frameworks that use the Rails philosophy recently like Grails and hopefully we
will see a few success stories come out of those too.

~~~
matth
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Twitter having scaling issues earlier this
summer? I think Twitter's developers placed the blame squarely on Rails.

~~~
veritas
We've been through this :P

Twitter had scaling problems because they had such a massive onslaught on
their systems. Any language/framework would've buckled a little under that
stress. I'm not saying RoR is perfect (its not...) and it has its bottlenecks,
but to solely blame the language isn't fair.

Scribd runs on RoR and they've yet to bitch about scaling. Twitter seems to
running well now.

Just use whatever feels right in your hands. I use RoR with Django/Python a
close second. If you ever run into Twitter-like scaling problems, then good
for you. Worry about that when it happens.

~~~
matth
So after getting downmodded, and no one actually correcting me, I decided do a
quick Google search and see what came up. Oh, looks like I was right. In an
interview, Twitter developer Alex Payne blames the Rails framework for scaling
issues.

Interview: How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?

By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now.
_Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any
growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on
another framework._ The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is
that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The
problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster,
in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time
there's no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. The
solutions to this are caching the hell out of everything and setting up
multiple read-only slave databases, neither of which are quick fixes to
implement. So it's not just cost, it's time, and time is that much more
precious when people can['t] reach your site.None of these scaling approaches
are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and
syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being
absolutely punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails
does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move the slow parts
of your application out of Rails, or both.It's also worth mentioning that
there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind at this point that Ruby itself is
slow. It's great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the
language, but right now, it's tough. If you're looking to deploy a big web
application and you're language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in
Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby
fans, but I think it's worth being frank that this isn't one of those
relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

[http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-
twi...](http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-
developer-alex-payne/)

And just to be clear, I wasn't knocking Rails. I have absolutely nothing
against it, I haven't even used it yet. I was just trying to point something
out. The developer's words, not mine.

The fervor among some of you is disturbing.

~~~
madmotive
I'm sure this has been on here before but this is a good follow up to that
article and it's also from the chaps at Twitter:

\---- For us, it's really about scaling horizontally - to that end, Rails and
Ruby haven't been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or
framework. The performance boosts associated with a "faster" language would
give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes that Ruby
and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it was in
January. \-----

[http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-
twitter-10...](http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-
twitter-10000-percent-faster)

------
frankus
It's a very intelligently-designed framework built on top of a very expressive
(even fun) language.

But some web apps are too trivial to justify the overhead, and some may be too
vast to want to run in a somewhat pokey interpreted language.

But for something of the size and complexity in the range of Basecamp or (one
of my favorites) Snacksby, you'd be stupid not to use it (or a similarly-
capable framework).

Another seriously cool framework is Seaside, but so far I haven't gotten my
hands dirty with coding, just played around with the seriously amazing dabble
DB. It's not very "web like", but it can do stuff that makes my head hurt when
thinking of programming it even on top of Rails.

------
astrec
It's important to remember that Ruby and Rails are not the same thing.

Ruby has a lot of very nice features, but a slow-ish runtime (JRuby & IronRuby
might be a different matter). As for a Ruby bubble (as opposed to a Rails
bubble), I doubt it as there is now quite a community (and a loyal following
of prag devs) around the language itself.

Rails is one of many interesting frameworks getting around these days (another
worth a look is Python based Django). As the framework matures the hype bubble
will burst, but Rails has some way to go before obscurity.

------
davidw
It's a big step on the path forward, even if you only judge by how many people
are copying it.

It gets a lot of things right, in my opinion. It had to - no one would even
consider jumping to a new platform for a %10 increase, so it must be
significant.

------
brlewis
I do not think it's the holy grail. At the same time, I wouldn't count success
stories to gauge its usefulness. There are many factors going into success,
and the programming language you choose is just one of them.

------
yrashk
while we use it to power our startup, I don't think that it is a holy grail :)

------
sharpshoot
scribd!

