Live data from Hacker News

How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

infoq.com

1–10 of 101 posts

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#3
As an MS developer this really is devastating.

Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that.

I still need to use .Net at work but I think this combines with a bunch of other factors to push me away from Microsoft on anything else I do.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#4
My first question after reading the title was "Why?"

From the article:

"JA: All the problems we had (licensing, testing, deployments) could have been overcome. We could have used workarounds, written our own deployment framework, etc. What is comes down to is that we both really enjoy working with Rails and we enjoy the Rails community and the tools and libraries available. One of the best parts about running the show is that we get to do what makes us happy."

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#5
post #3

As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…

It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost.

I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the same ways - but there's a somewhat stunted element to the .NET OSS ecosystem. Hopefully that will change.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#6
Actually, from Rails, to ASP.NET MVC, to ASP.NET MVC again ("because it was getting too complicated"), then to Rails.

I'd also be very hesitant to use MongoDB as a main datastore as it has no durability model - the 'D' in ACID. I hope they've at least changed the setting, or don't mind losing their last 60 seconds of writes when their EC2 instance goes down.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair#Du...

Note that Mongo compares itself to MyISAM, but that is infrequently used now because of its lack of durability amongst other things - no transaction support, etc (most apps use InnoDB).

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#7
post #3

As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…

As a long time former .NET consultant (been using it since Beta 1), once I went OSS, it was nigh impossible to return to Windows land.

Right now I'm the CTO for a largish image licensing shop (think Getty, but more boutique/high end) that is entirely .NET (I inherited it). We are now in the process of moving it off Windows onto an OSS stack. It's a miserable experience. And an expensive one.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#8
post #3

As an MS developer this really is devastating. Rob Conery is one of the names that any fan of ASP.NET MVC knew. He was involved in the project when he worked there (I'd call him the most high profile MS employee aside from Scott Guthrie). To have him come out and say he couldn't make a startup work with Microsoft technology really tells you all you need to know about that. I still need to use .Net at work but I think…

It has nothing to do with the technology - it's good stuff and we could have made it work fine. The issue is we want to stay small and not take on the associated cost. I can see how it might come off like I'm damning the platform - that was hardly my intention. Rails has had 3+ years of Open Source contribution to build out the platform and make it do amazing things - ASP.NET MVC will (hopefully) grow in some of the…

That will never change because the surrounding ecosystem is expensive as shit.

It's also very slow moving and wildly outdated.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#9
post #6

Actually, from Rails, to ASP.NET MVC, to ASP.NET MVC again ("because it was getting too complicated"), then to Rails. I'd also be very hesitant to use MongoDB as a main datastore as it has no durability model - the 'D' in ACID. I hope they've at least changed the setting, or don't mind losing their last 60 seconds of writes when their EC2 instance goes down. http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair#D…

We actually use MySQL as a transaction log for things like orders/views to balance that out, MongoDB stores everything else though.

Re: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and NoSQL

#10
post #9
post #6

Actually, from Rails, to ASP.NET MVC, to ASP.NET MVC again ("because it was getting too complicated"), then to Rails. I'd also be very hesitant to use MongoDB as a main datastore as it has no durability model - the 'D' in ACID. I hope they've at least changed the setting, or don't mind losing their last 60 seconds of writes when their EC2 instance goes down. http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair#D…

We actually use MySQL as a transaction log for things like orders/views to balance that out, MongoDB stores everything else though.

Gotcha, that works, and was mentioned in passing. Mongo still makes me nervous, but otherwise looks very promising.
Post reply on HN