Shanti’s Dispatches

One guy decides he doesn’t want to convert his site over to Rails after all, switches back to PHP, and does it all MVC and “Rails”-style.

The article hits the front page of digg, reddit, del.icio.us — all the usual suspects.

Suddenly people are claiming Ruby/Rails to now be in the “trough of disillusionment” cycle of programming languages. Were people really expecting Ruby & Rails to sprinkle magic fairy dust on every single one of their development & scalability problems?

The initial “hype” around Rails was all about quickly building greenfield apps with rapid prototyping, less code & less configuration. A promise which it has largely delivered upon.

Massive Google.com-like scalability, integration with 100s of legacy tables, etc. was never (nor will ever be) the sweetspot of Rails. I’m personally sorry if you got led down the wrong path, Mr. Sivers.

The Twitter / Rails Fiasco

Twitter hit a major performance bottleneck a few months ago (not unlike PHP-powered Digg when it went down for several days in early 2006), but Twitter has since improved performance 10,000%.

Turns out it wasn’t very much of a Rails/application-server issue at all. The database architecture needed some reworking along with the infrastructure for supporting the more than 90% of requests to the site that come in through the Twitter API.

But when just the one site was having issues, everyone wanted to lay the scaling blame at Ruby’s feet.

Derek Sivers Prefers PHP

Okay. Who is this guy again? So he made a big hullabaloo when he decided he was going to switch to Rails from PHP on his massive application that uses hundreds of tables and faces customers, employees, suppliers, etc.

You thought this would be an easy task in Rails how exactly?

I think there is more going on here than meets the eye.

Part of what you do in Rails is break things down into Model-View-Controller containers. Views, go into rhtml and rxml files.

Was Derek & Co. not breaking things into views for Rails these past two years?

Just doing that would be a good step in the right direction. Rails views could fairly easily (imho) be ported over to PHP templating views. It’s largely a matter of syntactic sugar. ($foo vs. @foo, etc) Some of the more elegant Ruby syntactic sugar might have to be dropped (@items.each into “for $item in $items” or whatever PHP looping preference you have)

Re: The Point on Sample Sizes

The next time someone tells you that the Earth is flat, are you going to change your whole worldview based on one person’s opinion?

Think for yourself people.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos