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Twitter Reportedly May Abandon Ruby On Rails
Raster Burn writes "According to TechCrunch, Twitter has plans to abandon Ruby on Rails after two years of scalability issues. Candidates to replace Rails are said to be PHP, Java, and Ruby without the Rails framework." The post links a brief comment (at 139 characters, probably a tweet) from Twitter founder Ev Williams saying it ain't so. The comments following the post embody the controversy over whether or not RoR sucks.
I have an argument with a coworker frequently about architectural orthogonality vs performance. I fall on the "architecture should be clean and easy to understand and maintain" side of the argument and he falls on the "speed, memory, and response time at all cost" side.
What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles? If the price of that productivity imposes a maximum limit on performance, how much optimization should be undertaken?
It's a hard question to answer. On the one hand employees are expensive and hardware is cheap. On the other hand, you can't simply forego developing for performance just because of some religious belief that architecture should be clean.
The problem is Ruby. It is a very slow language (http://www.blognone.com/node/4385). My tests confirm it is 20 times slower than python in simple loops. Java is a dinosaur and PHP is not easy to maintain. I would go with Django or web2py. If they use web2py (http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu), I will help them. web2py scales very well because allows you to bytecode compile the models, the controllers and the views (so there is no parsing when serving a page) and cache every function in ram.
Having worked with Rails for a year, I have found listening to people who talk on any web forum about any language draws out nothing but hyperbole. So, I would take most of what is said here with a grain of salt since it is obvious that most of the people commenting here are stating "truths" from religious wars.
The framework operates a multiple levels. At the highest, a complete page can be generated from scaffold that automatically hook model to controller to view. I have found the scaffolds to be lack luster. From a completely database-centric view, there are some neat things that are automatically generated. For instance, verification methods in models are use to display errors on the page and mark input fields in red. My personal experience has found scaffolds to be lackluster.
Most well-designed applications revolve around the application's use, not its internal data representation. Using scaffold strongly ties the interface to data representation which creates the situation that "the user can be wrong." You see this in Microsoft Access databases where you can enter something in or choose options that are mutually exclusive. Because the application lets you see that data, the program generates an error if you are wrong. From what I have seen, the gripe is that the full scaffold is too specific and rigid. Well, duh?! That's the point of each layer of scaffold--to provide a guide for usage.
Personally, I have shunned most of the page scaffolding and tend to rely on creating my own use flow. I use the controllers to present that choices are possible and to manipulate the models as opposed to the common practice of having the controller just load a set of records and pass it to the view (which formats the output). The advantage is that the user is never wrong. Options that are logically inconsistent are never presented. Add to this the ability to monkey-patch (the extension of predefined classes) and lambdas, the code is clean and concise. Both can be used to refactor procedural code into functional code and move it out of the controllers and models. Most importantly, the design allows you to think about what you want to manipulate and then after the fact extend the functionality. A common example of the is the statement:
1.day.from_now
The numeric class is extended in Rails so that you do not have find and use a static date class, but can state simply the desired result.
So, where does it fail miserably? So far, I have not found any great place that it does. It performs as well I need it to serve about a dozen users on a lowly Pentium 4 machine with 256 megs of RAM. So far, the application has been 99% maintenance free. A date verification package I am using had a Feb 29th bug in it. The cool thing is that since I can see the source, I could fixed it. Perhaps there are issues with scaling, but from what I understand, the system was designed around a non-centric design. In theory, a correctly designed application should be able scale horizontally.
Given that there are other high-profile, high-use web sites written in Rails that do not suffer from Twitter's issues, I am left thinking that its failure in general looking for a specific reason. Rails has been very stable and easy to extend, but then I write for maintenance and ignore hype.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Pardon the off topic rant (please feel free to mod appropriately), but I have to agree that RoR DOES SUCK. (At least I didn't set up my own blog just to rant about it.) The RUBY language is the best thing since sliced bread, but Rails isn't. And I'm not talking about the installation and management issues like everyone else. I mean from a developer's perspective, RoR is horrible. Here's why:
.NET and it's various components, but I don't want to work on Windows, I don't want to work with IIS, I don't want to write VB or C#, and .NET really does a bad job of layouts and makes a lot of other stuff more complicated. And it's ORM simply can't touch ActiveRecord. Rails does only a tiny amount of what it could and should.
1) Automated copy-n-paste is still copy-n-paste
Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files from the distribution into the app directory it creates. How do you upgrade? Painfully, that's how. I have numerous small applications that break when I upgrade rails and it's dependencies because the copied files don't work with the newer version. My applications should be 100% code I write directly. Everything else should be kept separate and accessed via includes so emerge/apt/yum/gem dependencies can keep the rails code compatible with itself and I never have to "fix" code I didn't write.
2) RoR gives you the 1% that's used 10% of the time, not the 10% that's used 90% of the time.
So you set up a RAILS app, create your database table, and run 'generate' to get your pseudo-MVC (seen #4 below). You've got everything you need to edit a single table via the web, but that's not even close to an application. It probably saved me about 1/2 of setting things up by hand. That's simply not good enough. It should be able to create an app that supports validation (both JS and server-side for obvious stuff like numeric and lengths), sorting, filtering, searching, relationships, and css skins. It could do this just from the information available in the database metadata, which would get you 90% done. And a huge number of simple apps could be completed simply by writing a custom CSS skin and adding some graphics.
3) No UI components, which are the hardest part of web development.
Most of what rails does buy you is the back-end stuff. It's an easy way to get stared with ActiveRecord, which does the heavy SQL lifting. AR, the one shining gem of RoR, is a great object-relational model and I believe it is responsible for 99% of RoR's popularity. But SQL isn't that complicated in the first place. The real tough part of web development is getting rich, graphical, reusable UI components that work across web browsers. Prototype/Scriptaculous are a wonderful starting place, but I need code that I can feed an AR class (and possibly a list of columns and/or related tables+columns) that will generate cross-browser compatible HTML view of the table complete with searching, sorting, filtering, and paging. There could be functions/objects that render it as a table, a list, a tree, etc. You're probably thinking I should just use
4) It's NOT MVC
The Model-View-Controller design pattern is about limiting the amount of communication necessary by having one instance of some code (the controller) that all access to data (the model) from other code (the views) goes through. Views subscribe to a model, get their data and then do their thing without worrying about other views. If some other view changes the model, the controller notifies all other subscribed views of the change. Rails MVC is something totally different that doesn't solve the same problem. Rails does provide data validation via AR, which is part of true MVC, but it still misses the point of MVC, which is a coherent and always up to date set of views into the model. In fact, an MVC is impossible to implement over the web because communication is one way: the browser must initiate all communication with the web server. (For those that don't "get" this,