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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
