What's the Secret Sauce in Ruby on Rails?

An anonymous reader writes "Ruby on Rails seems to be a lightning rod for controversy. At the heart of most of the controversy lies amazing productivity claims. Rails isn't a better hammer; it's a different kind of tool. This article explores the compromises and design decisions that went into making Rails so productive within its niche."

Comments

scaling rails

[jbellis]

"This means it already overcame the greatest hurdle of any web-development framework from day one"

You give Rails far too much credit.

First, among popular development environments, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that Rails is _hardest_ to scale in the sense of "serving lots of pages really fast," mostly due to Ruby itself being pretty damn slow. I'm not a J2EE snob trolling here: it really is. For small sites this doesn't matter because your glue language is much less of a factor than hitting your database, but as you start caching appropriately and so forth Ruby really does become a liability.

Now, Rails does make it easy to scale in the sense of "if I throw more hardware at the problem, throughput improves." But this is not a difficult problem. Arguing that "[m]ost Scheme/Lisp frameworks, for instance, still haven't achieved [that] level of scalabilty" is silly and probably false, but I'm not enough of a Lisp weenie to know. I _do_ know that Python, PHP, Java, TCL, .NET, hell, even Objective-C frameworks manage it. It's a solved problem; bragging about it just makes you look clueless.