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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.
How complex can Twitter be on the inside? In the 1.5 years they've been publicly grousing about Rails they could have redone it ten times over.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Twitter is a major site, even if you yourself have never heard of it, with many tens of thousands of users. As such it is felt by many to by *the* flagship RoR application. Unfortunately it has suffered from numerous outages, some of these lasting days at a time.
twitter is a microblogging system.
You can twitter from your cell or PC.
I think it is one of the most usless things on the face of the earth but it seems popular for some strange reason.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
This is what Twitter is for.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's a service to announce to your friends what you're having for dinner, how satisfying your bowel movements are, and whether or not you intend to see the hip concert that is happening next week in your neighborhood.
It's the blog without the content, the conversation without the words, the letter to a friend without the feeling, and the kiss goodnight without the tongue.
As for the significance of them allegedly leaving RoR, that's anyone's guess. Probably to incite more PHP vs. RoR battles on /.
Most popular things are useless.
And for all those Ruby people in denial to the fact that people have been saying this for years, here is your proof yet again. Of course I will be marked down as being a troll for pointing this out by the RUBY comunity but it is time that they acknowledge the inherent achilles heel of the language.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Rails was the cat's pajamas two years ago. The future. The in-thing. Revolutionary. Exciting. Radical. Amazing!
Then like so many similar times before, reality set in. It turned out to be buggy, unstable, less performant, and heavily dependant upon an evangelical base.
Ruby the language is interesting. Not my personal cuppa, but I have nothing against it. Rails, however... After having analyzed it and developed a prototype application for my company, I came to realize that there are other frameworks out there that are more worthwhile, epecially in an enterprise environment. The problems I've seen Twitter experience only solidify this.
If you are doing green-field development Rails should probably not be your first choice. Yes, Rails is interesting. No, it is not the end-all-be-all, and it certainly has some rather major warts.
In my day, we had talk, finger, vi, and elm and we never complained! Green vt100 terminals were all anyone really needed! Get off of my lawn!
Seriously, talk had advantages over IM. You actually could see what the other person typed as they typed it, including backspaces...
And finger worked great. I knew a nerd that had his
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
See Hilton, Paris
I think it is one of the most usless things on the face of the earth but it seems popular for some strange reason.
It depends on what you use it for. For what I use it for it's quite useless but if you're into notifying groups of friends what you happen to be doing and want it to be delivered by their preferred method of receiving that information, then it's great.
I want to tell 10+ people that I'm going away for the weekend and I don't want to deal with two SMSs, three e-mails, four IMs and one phone call so I just fire off a message on twitter and it's all done and everyone gets the information quickly and easily.
and digg, reddit. Not slashdot though.
Of Code And Men
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.
Rails remains the best way to develop solid and maintainable web apps. But it will not compete with C for speed. Once you understand your business process, and have developed a mature algorithm to make the business work, there is nothing wrong with writing the core infrastructure in C. There are lots of C libraries that do the core part of Twitter. But the company would have been idiotic to start with them, and would be foolish to move new development off Rails.
So, er... TechCrunch says "multiple sources claim that Twitter is abandoning RoR."
The guy who founded Twitter says, "no, not really."
And TechCrunch says, "but we have MULTIPLE SOURCES."
Guess what? I have MULTIPLE SOURCES that say the Earth is flat!
Must be a slow news day.
Seriously, talk had advantages over IM. You actually could see what the other person typed as they typed it, including backspaces...
ICQ actually offered a "chat session" feature that did that. but it required direct client-client connection which made many people (me included) abandon it. Also it apparently had fairly high network overhead.
I tend to think being able to compose your thoughts before letting the other end see them is probablly a good thing anyway.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I don't think the problem is Ruby. Whilst I'm not associated with Twitter, I have seen some of their presentations on subject of performance, and the major bottleneck seemed to be the database, and ActiveRecord's unoptimized querying of it.
MatzRuby 1.8 is somewhat slow, but it does proportionality very little work compared to the MySQL and Memcached back end. Quite frankly, I've never seen a performance profile of a Rails site where Ruby was the problem; it's almost always the database, or too many AR queries.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or you could just email them all.
Unless you are claiming there are a substantial percentage of folks who use twitter but don't use email. I'll want citations for that though, because I don't believe it for a minute.
The RoR is a movement that depends on it's public perception. If Twitter abandons the RoR framework, then RoR could lose (if it hasn't already) a lot of steam, and appeal to the general public.
The RoR community does not want this to happen.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
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,
I know it isn't considered trendy,although "Good Old VB6" is still in the top 5 of programming languages(number 3 to be precise) and as long as you aren't trying to build some gigantic multi-use program it really works great. Of course I've been using BASIC since the days of the VIC 20(recording my programs to a cassette,boy THAT was fun) so for me it just works.YMMV of course and I've known guys that can do the same in Java,C++,etc. IMHO if it does the job you need it to and the customers are happy I say go for it.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most popular things are useless.
Like Windows?Actually, all of these free social networking services have figured out how to monetize it.
Twitter is the honeypot to collect a group of users. After a density of users is reached, larger communication companies will start looking at purchasing Twitter so they can "integrate" their service. Nevermind that integrating a free service with an available API doesn't require purchase.
What the larger company is actually doing is buying customers.
From the TOS: Business Transfers Twitter may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy. You will have the opportunity to opt out of any such transfer if the new entity's planned processing of your information differs materially from that set forth in this Privacy Policy. Build Service - Grow Userbase - Sell Demographic data.
It's the web 2.0 business model, all coated in a lovely veneer of altruistic "doing it for the love of geekiness" bullshit.
Personally I would never run a high volume site on top of a scripting language platform. While RoR is pretty nice on getting a site up and running and integrated with a database, it is still poor in the scalability department.
For a medium to large site they should consider using servlets and java and avoid J2EE.
For a very large site I would recommend C/C++ and maybe java if they have the budget for hardware.
The toughest part is getting developers that can code webapps (not just CGIs) in C/C++ (while easy to do C/C++ developers overall are hard to find and are not as cheap as ruby/perl/python ones and even java ones; this is from experience of trying to hire them). So they should check their developer base and see what is the fastest language they feel very comfortable with and go with it. From experience they may have to settle for java since that will provide them a large pool to pick developers from and the learning curve is slightly less steep than C/C++.
I suspect they fell into the trap of building a demo fast using RoR and then just going with it into production, I have seen this way too many times unfortunately.
Wow, generating and serving web pages in C/C++ - does anyone still do that? Are there any modern libraries that, for example, make your tables look good by emitting different HTML based on the browser? That layer of abstraction is key these days, but I've only seen people doing it in PHP.
A modern C++ library that takes an abstract layout description and creates browser-specific HTML to match that description would be a very cool thing. A C++ library that merely generates "standard HTML, verified by the W3C" would be a nighmare to work with/around.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Actually yes and majority of the huge sites on the web use C/C++ (having worked on several where 10 million hits a day is an easy load). Most places have their own but stl + boost is pretty damn nice and will do most of the things you want. You would probably want to look into writing ISAPI extension or apache modules which is not difficult at all and the performance difference between say C and java is significant. One point to note, java garbage collector under severe loads is not pleasant to tune (I have to deal with that currently and it's a pain). Its not uncommon for java process to spike to 1GB+ in a matter of seconds before GC has a chance to kick in and slow things down :) In C you can allocate and release memory in a much more controlled way thus controlling the server's footprint under spikey loads.
And indeed, your experience differs a lot from that of thousands of web developers. Perl in particular had been called the Duct Tape of the Internet.
Speaking of Perl, I notice that your complaint it is not that it's slow, but that it's hard to support. That's a legitimate complaint, but it says nothing about the relative efficiency of scripting languages.
I wonder if they've considered Groovy on Grails instead of Java or PHP? Groovy has all the dynamic language features that make Ruby and JavaScript popular with developers, but is essentially 100% backward compatible with Java (since it's running on top of the Java VM and is implemented in Java). Groovy also leverages Java and any other language that can be hosted on the Java VM because it interoperates with all of that stuff, and itself runs on the same VM. You also get legitimate closures and simplified syntax for many things. It can even give you Java 5 semantics (generics, enumerations, etc.) under JDK 1.4.
Grails is very similar to Rails, but is not a straight port -- more "inspired by," as it's described by its proponents. Grails also doesn't have the problem that Rails has in terms of scalability and performance, since it's built on Groovy/Java (which have a real threading model). No screwing around with creating a zillion Mongrel instances to scale your site, etc. And if you don't care to use the built-in web server that comes with Grails, you can have the Grails framework generate a WAR file which you can deploy in any container like Tomcat or Jboss.
At a recent 3-day Grails training session taught by Scott Davis, I was surprised to hear that some major corporations have jumped on the Groovy/Grails bandwagon, including Mutual of Omaha. For a conservative company to make that kind of leap says something. (Furthermore, they used to be a COBOL shop -- the rationale appears to be that it's easier to get COBOL programmers to make the leap to Groovy first, then switch slowly to Java, as opposed to migrating directly to Java.)
After that 3-day training, I was pretty impressed. The biggest win for Grails seems to be rapid development and deployment, but all the other stuff you get for free in the package makes it something you'd like to stick with. I'd say the thing that most impressed me with Grails was GORM, which makes Hibernate even easier to work with. GORM spoils me, since it obviates the need to write SQL most of the time.
Have you tried PHP? I hear it runs several high load websites ;-)
Bradley Holt