In a recent interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne, he candidly admitted that the the Ruby programming language, and by association the Rails framework, aren't very scalable. A couple of comments really stuck out:
“Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues – issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner than I think we would on another framework. The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it.”
and:
“Its also worth mentioning that there shouldnt be doubt in anybodys mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow.”
I'm not a Rails developer myself so I can't agree or disagree but coming from a developer of such a large site as Twitter, these comments really make you wonder why Rails is such a hot framework and why people are flocking to it.
Now, I'm not posting about this to take a cheap shot at the Rails community but I truly question all of the hype that surrounds Ruby on Rails when proven technologies such as ColdFusion and BlueDragon continue to be treated as red-headed step children. Its certainly been proven time and time again that CF-based servers can effectively scale and handle large web applications. But here we have an example of an application framework (Rails) that's the darling of the web development world and yet is having trouble meeting the demands of one of the newest and fastest growing websites on the Net.
So, how does ColdFusion break out of this position? I'd really like to hear from you my readers. I'm looking forward to your ideas and suggestions and I'll be sure to have Adobe CF Product Manager Tim Buntel and New Atlanta President Vince Bonfanti review suggestions so they can better position their respective products.
