By: René Pickhardt

René Pickhardt — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 22:05:46 +0000

I am not so sure. If we use rails in the way we want to use it with our service oriented architecture we will not use Active Record. Also we can use Eventmachine to go asynchronous. In this way we can quickly hack some front end that passes requests forward to services. Yes ruby on rails is slow but as I said the middleware can easily scale horizontally by setting up some load balencers or even have the DNS return more than one IP address in order to get more randomization.
So yes I totally agree that a standard ruby on rails application will be or at least should be a nightmare to scale but I am rather confident that as soon as back end services exist and RoR uses them in the way I just described we should be able to benefit from the fast developing time and easy to read code while not running into scaling issues.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 22:13:21 +0000

Rails applications that grow beyond the size of a simple blog are an absolute nightmare to maintain. Calling them easily maintainable is far from the truth, imo.
The big advantage of Rails is getting a prototype developed quickly to prove an idea. After that, it’s useless. Slow, horrible to maintain, difficult to change, and hard to have confidence in unless you have 100% test coverage (which, while not difficult to achieve is difficult to maintain as the application grows).
Good luck.

Comments on: My ranked list of priorities for Backend Web Programming: Scalability > Maintainable code > performance

By: René Pickhardt

By: Jim