Many people seem to refer only the scalability (performance, that is) side of the argument but only few who actually pointed out the developer's productivity of choosing Scala and Java for Twitter situation.
Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#62I was recently in a quandary over the choice of technology. I started RoR and I really like it. However I was concerned about long term implications of that choice. The thing that I am taking from this talk is that I shouldn't worry about that, right now. If and when I need to scale, I will have enough resources to make a better choice. Resources that I don't have right now.
I'd agree. Yammer followed pretty much the same path: our main app is still a Rails app and we ship more Rails code every week.
We've migrated some key parts out to HTTP services written in Scala, Java, or node.js.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#63I was recently in a quandary over the choice of technology. I started RoR and I really like it. However I was concerned about long term implications of that choice. The thing that I am taking from this talk is that I shouldn't worry about that, right now. If and when I need to scale, I will have enough resources to make a better choice. Resources that I don't have right now.
try grails http://www.grails.org . Java/groovy version of ROR. It also has a clojure plugin
He worried about performance. Grails runs on JVM, but AFAIK, it is not as fast as Java/Scala/Clojure.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#64very interesting talk.
I was surprised that there was no mention of using a lower level language i.e. c or c++ in order to maximize cpu/ram utilization. while JVM is a clear winner over ROR it does add some overhead.
I guess it is a sweet spot between performance and code manageability.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#65With the release of Java 7 (invokedynamic) the performance of these dynamic languages (like ruby and python) may become much less of a factor (JRuby and Jython). At least that's what the JRuby folks imply: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/jruby-1-6-released-now-w... Punch Line from Link: "There’s a very real chance that invokedynamic could improve JRuby performance many times, putting us on par with our statically…
Is there any evidence this is actually true? Currently, IronPython and IronRuby do not have great performance on the CLR despite dynamic support.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#66I'm still not getting the futz they're making over their "scale". So your inbound load is 7000 tweets/sec or roughly 250 MBit/s (assuming 4k per tweet). Then you fan that out to (assuming) 20 append-only mailboxes on average. Perhaps my assumptions are far off, but I'm only arriving at a couple GBit/s here and a low two digit number of terabytes/storage per year. This sounds like "a couple racks" to me, not like "a c…
Here is an old presentation from a year ago.
http://www.slideshare.net/nkallen/q-con-3770885
Now, at the time they were doing peak 2000 tweet/s. The fan-out was 1.2M deliveries a second... So if we go with the current 600:1 ratio at 7000/s, that's about 4.2M/s. I actually know it's much higher now since I work there but other things to consider is we have a large data warehouse, search, API, pipelines to external parties for the firehose, logging at terabytes an hour, in-house metric collection doing 3M writes/s, etc.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/59830692/Cassandra-at-Twitter
It add's up very fast.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#67Any thoughts solving scaling issues with node.js..
Until node gets some type of bind-fork-accept mechanism (built in) to utilize more than one cpu in a native and simple fashion (cluster/multi-node are close), I feel it will not gain the same level of traction that java has.
People also have opinions about java(scala/clojure) vs javascript from a language preference standpoint. I think it is too early to tell what impact this will have.
However, many developers I know seem to have a strong distaste for Java, the JVM, and the ecosystem around both. I think several of those folks would look to node, erlang, or possibly even golang (if it gets faster) simply to avoid using java.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#68Any thoughts solving scaling issues with node.js..
Until node gets some type of bind-fork-accept mechanism (built in) to utilize more than one cpu in a native and simple fashion (cluster/multi-node are close), I feel it will not gain the same level of traction that java has. People also have opinions about java(scala/clojure) vs javascript from a language preference standpoint. I think it is too early to tell what impact this will have. However, many developers I kno…
I noticed that the people who have a strong distaste for Java are largely application-developers. In most cases, these developers usually just work with the available libraries or APIs to build a website backed by database (some of them are consultants that build similar apps over and over again).
Back-end developers seem to (maybe?) prefer to use Java.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until node gets some type of bind-fork-accept mechanism (built in) to utilize more than one cpu in a native and simple fashion (cluster/multi-node are close), I feel it will not gain the same level of traction that java has. People also have opinions about java(scala/clojure) vs javascript from a language preference standpoint. I think it is too early to tell what impact this will have. However, many developers I kno…
I noticed that the people who have a strong distaste for Java are largely application-developers. In most cases, these developers usually just work with the available libraries or APIs to build a website backed by database (some of them are consultants that build similar apps over and over again). Back-end developers seem to (maybe?) prefer to use Java.
Where are you pulling your hunch from? If anything, most of the ruby & node developers came from the back-end world of Java. I know I'm one of these people. Backend java developers have to use configuration heavy IOC frameworks like Spring, Guice, Hibernate, etc, whereas most of these ideas can be emulated in a more flexible language like Ruby.
Re: Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
#70Anyone pondering their technology stack should watch this video. It doesn't matter what you initially employ as a technology/framework/server to get your app up and running, but if you need to scale the JVM is were it's at. I say that as a Rubyist.
I was surprised when I got some pushback on this concept at a local Django meetup last week. A lot of people believe that Python & Ruby-type languages are the backend languages of the future.
They are the languages of the present (and future, for a while I'm sure), but the JVM is the platform to write these languages to.