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Ruby’s been Workin’ on the Rails


By Alex Handy
January 15, 2006 — 
Ruby on Rails, the Web application framework that reached version 1.0 in mid-December, has gathered a full head of open-source steam over the past year, and numerous luminaries of the Java community, such as Bruce Tate and David Geary, have headed to Ruby, thanks to a development environment that’s been called both quick and easy.

“I think Ruby on Rails has a lot of promise,” said open-source analyst and Navica CEO Bernard Golden. “They give you a lot of the infrastructure: My term would be they give you a lot of the plumbing. Rather than creating all the connections, it just delivers all that. It gives you a huge leg-up in building your prototypical database-driven Web site.”

Richard Monson-Haefel, a senior analyst at the Burton Group, has just completed a 30-page report on Ruby on Rails. He said Ruby is an excellent evolving technology that should be considered by organizations searching for new Web frameworks.

“It offers a very strict Model-View-Controller model,” he said. “But it gives you the ease of development a lot of people associate with PHP. It’s much easier to maintain than a complex PHP script or a simple J2EE program. J2EE is notoriously complex, and PHP can be tough to maintain because it doesn’t have a good MVC. It’s very good for developing Web applications very quickly.”

Monson-Haefel pointed out some of Ruby on Rails’ shortcomings, which are primarily database-related. “1.0 of Ruby on Rails did not support compound primary keys [common in relational databases] and has no support for legacy databases.”

He said the framework also lacks support for two-phased commit. “If you’re making changes to two databases and you want them both to roll back at the same time, it doesn’t support that. Only 10 to 15 percent of Web applications need that.”

One Web site that has moved to Ruby on Rails is the popular comic site Penny Arcade . Webmaster and system administrator Erik Karulf said that when new comics come out three times a week, Penny Arcade can receive an average of 700 unique hits a second. Prior to the Ruby on Rails transition in November, Penny Arcade was a PHP/MySQL-based site.

“The poor MySQL server just couldn’t keep up,” said Karulf. “The first thing we did when we switched to Ruby on Rails was standardize the template and header and footer, and it’s made my life a lot easier.” The entire site, he said, takes up about 1,200 lines of code.

‘Unsung Hero’
Karulf also has transitioned Penny Arcade to another piece of technology that the Ruby on Rails community advocates: Lighthttpd. “The unsung hero of Penny Arcade right now is Lighthttpd. The site generates the page files once. To do that in Ruby on Rails took me two lines of code. The scaling is amazing on static files.”

Lighthttpd is a smaller alternative to Apache, and is one of the two Web servers supported by Ruby on Rails.

Monson-Haefel recommends Ruby on Rails to his clients. “We tell companies that it’s very productive,” he said. “We recommend it for department-level Web applications and for small start-ups, but not for mission-critical super-high transaction processing. The ecosystem is a little anemic in that the number of libraries and the types of solutions that can be added on top of Rails aren’t there.”


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