Twitter Said To Drop Rails: So What?
Twitter is said to rewrite parts of their application with something else than RoR to solve their performance/availability issues. Is this good news? Is this a reason for Code Ignitor fans and Django preachers to just celebrate? Should the symfony community see this as a wonderful opportunity?
Not at all. There will be two major consequences, both bad for all frameworks out there. Firstly, IT managers will move away from open-source web application frameworks, because from their point of view, if the most well-known open-source web application framework can’t handle the traffic, no other can. Secondly, the frameworks communities look dumber than ever, all fighting with zealot blindness and non-professional arguments. I don’t see any enterprise decision maker pick a tool if this tools’ support relies on a bunch of guys who just think Their Way Is The Best Way No Doubt About That.
Developers around the world really need to realize that there must not be only one solution. This is called a monopoly. Having many frameworks out there leaves more room for innovation, doesn’t concentrate the future of web developement in too few hands. Besides, with millions of web sites out there, the cake is big enough for everybody to get a large piece. If there was only one way to build web apps - say symfony, for instance - then developers would be trapped. And for the cases where symfony would not be the best tool (I can see plenty), there would not be any alternative.
Doubt if the fuel of faith. There are good ideas to grab in every project. You shouldn’t rely on the will of a single framework architect for your whole business model. And eventually, success is contagious. So please show your happyness when other frameworks get positive reviews, not the opposite.
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That rumor has been shot down by this: http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348
I don´t know for sure, of course. But rumors this big don´t start out of nothing.
It is obviously a marketing stunt devised by the Twitter guys to grab even more attention to themselves.
It doesn´t really matter if they use Rails or not. Not being able to scale Rails is more a proof of their team incompetence than some handicap of the framework (which it hasn´t, otherwise yellowpages.com and revolutionhealth.com would be out of the game a long time ago).
“IT managers will move away from open-source web application frameworks, because from their point of view, if the most well-known open-source web application framework can’t handle the traffic, no other can.”
What?! Could you explain how you get this conclusion?
Kind Regards
Amen
I don’t think IT manager will ever give up open source because of the failure of a single project. There was a lot of buzz around RoR, but clever managers have waited to see what come out of it or have made prototypes on internal project.
For IT manager, open source means low cost and Django, Code Ignitor or Symfony are still great frameworks.
Ruby on Rails is no harder to scale than any other framework. Twitter has in fact already conquered a number of scaling hurdles already. The only reason Twitter’s scaling issues have gained as much press as they have is that they have largely pioneered the production life-cycle of a Rails app. They ran into scaling problems just as other individuals have with every other technology; only, in their case, there was no one’s shoulders to stand on.
The first comment is true. This was a wildly unconfirmed rumor and was immediately denounced by the Twitter team. The source may be that Twitter is most likely not using “Rails” anymore, at least as it exists in the wild. It’s common practice with any framework to slowly replace or get rid of functionality, and in Twitter’s case I’m sure they’re largely at the point where there’s very little Rails left.
What will remain the same is Ruby, and Ruby has proven itself to be a very stable and scalable language. The Merb framework, also built on Ruby is blazingly fast.