It seems that a blog post was made by a guy named Jeremy Sivers to pimp his E-comerce site (Sorry, no google juice for you).
In the thinly veiled blog entry-come-advertisement Jeremy uses Rails and Ruby as a punching bag (up against PHP) to drive people to his site. (I nearly said “poorly designed” but my sites aren’t works of art either. Hey man, I’m no artist either!)
The many dozens of pages of comments are filled with many people backing up Rails and PHP while completely missing the point: Jeremy wants to use O’Reilly’s blogs as a means to advertise his poor coding and (his company’s) project management skills as well as to advertise.
His post can be summed up as follows:
Visit my site! Two years ago I decided to try and rewrite my site’s codebase with Rails while not bothering to leverage migrations (or to otherwise change the legacy schema to a rails-friendly schema). I suck at programming and project management and exadurate a lot so after wasting two years of time and money I decided to spend two months to code the site from scratch in PHP!
What I want to know is why didn’t he just use the existing codebase from the start? Was it broken? Was there some other Ruby/Rails standardisation in progress that required the E-commerce side to change then?
In any event: Don’t rewrite anything unless it doesn’t work. Use Rails’s conventions – they’re better than yours. Don’t worry about scaling, yet.
Incidentally my personal site is still backed with PHP because there’s no compelling reason to waste time rewriting it.
While it’s easy to say don’t worry about scaling (yet), I get the feeling that people rail on rails saying it can’t scale, etc, etc.
I’ve always thought it wasn’t really a rails-specific issue, as any language/framework is going to have growing pains when it needs to scale excessively. I finally came across something that backs this idea up in great length:
http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2007/9/25/designing-scalable-architectures
Comment by Josh Nichols — September 28, 2007 @ 05:39
Josh, I wish I took that tutorial! But the Twitter lecture on Wednesday was pretty good.
A properly designed rails application can scale. Most times it can scale just by throwing more hardware and adjusting Apache’s load balancer. Optimising slow parts of the codebase is something that should be done on an as-needed basis.
Scaling an application is rarely the first concern when creating it, rather, creating the application and having it earning income is the first concern. (which is naive and oversimplified but the point is still there.)
Comment by Lisa Seelye — September 28, 2007 @ 07:51