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Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

blog.targeterapp.com

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Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#51

Post by hkarthik »

tptacek wrote: post #24
EternalFury wrote: post #10

Does anyone know 1 major consumer-facing site that was able to scale with Rails? I know Twitter kind of had to move away from Rails due to scalability issues. GameBattles.com also had to back away from Rails after their uptime dropped to 80%. I am not trying to tarnish Rails, I am just curious to learn about some success stories involving Rails at very large scale.

Github, Airbnb, Groupon. Three reasons people think Rails doesn't "scale": (1) Earlier versions were adopted by applications with anomalous scaling requirements. So, the project had to "learn to scale" on its feet in a very short amount of time. There were predictable hiccups. Or, put even more simply: it's a young framework that got adopted quicker than people expected. (2) There's an expectation that web platforms…

> There's an expectation that web platforms can accomodate near-automatic horizontal scaling with maybe just a couple config-file tweaks. That expectation is unrealistic on any platform for which you can easily hire developers.

I can attest to this. I did consulting work for Match.com a few years ago back when they ran around 20 million uniques/month. They are a .NET shop here in Dallas, TX where you can throw a stone and likely hit a .NET developer.

After a few years, their stack looked nothing like a typical ASP.NET stack. It included things like custom database replication, memcached, config pulled out of files and stored in actual code, and lots of other things that went way off the beaten path from standard practices for .NET. New developers often had to learn "The Match Way" before they could be effective. Many things that worked with typical .NET enterprise apps would break down spectacularly when massive scale was thrown at them.

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#52

Post by triathlete »

czzarr wrote: post #47
gfosco wrote: post #32

Basically they switched for... personal opinion. That's all I can really gleam from the post. You can do it all in Node JS, they just didn't want to. Screw all the frameworks, I am working with bare-metal Node and loving every minute.

definitely agree with this. I can understand why 37signals use RoR, because they built it and know it inside out. But for a newcomer diving into rails now is difficult because the ecosystem is so huge it's hard to navigate, and everything is so integrated and you usually end up bundling a ton of thin that you don't need. With node everything is modularized, it is much more easier to understand what's happening under…

Completely agree. I tried to learn rails and gave up partly for this reason. I have been using node for a while now and LOVE it! I really dont understand why people bash node.

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#53

Post by heroic »

Spyro7 wrote: post #49

I really do think that, as time wears on, we will see more of these incidents of people switching from Node to another, more familiar development environment. It seems to me that a lot of people started using Node simply because of the amount of hype that surrounded it, and many of these decisions were not as well researched as they should've been. Reading through this gentleman's blog post, it seems that, originally…

Actually since the app was developed at startup weekend which gives you 54 hours to make a presentable demo, I'd say testing was not the first thing on their mind.

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#55

Post by triathlete »

andybak wrote: post #45

Maybe I'm missing something but isn't node for chat/messaging, API's and other stuff that you might have used something like Twisted for? Why would you use it over Rails/Django etc. for a content-heavy site (i.e. 95% of websites)

I use node for everything now myself for a number of reasons. The "problem" with node is that its still very young. And its a different programming model then people are used to. So its similiar to the whole RDBMS/document store argument. You use what works for your applicaiton.

The thing that annoys me personally is that they make it seems like there something wrong with node. And there isnt at all.

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#56

Post by andybak »

triathlete wrote: post #55
andybak wrote: post #45

Maybe I'm missing something but isn't node for chat/messaging, API's and other stuff that you might have used something like Twisted for? Why would you use it over Rails/Django etc. for a content-heavy site (i.e. 95% of websites)

I use node for everything now myself for a number of reasons. The "problem" with node is that its still very young. And its a different programming model then people are used to. So its similiar to the whole RDBMS/document store argument. You use what works for your applicaiton. The thing that annoys me personally is that they make it seems like there something wrong with node. And there isnt at all.

Does it provide any of the functionality that you get with a Django/Rails style framework? Or is it at a lower level?

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#57

Post by sbov »

EternalFury wrote: post #10

Does anyone know 1 major consumer-facing site that was able to scale with Rails? I know Twitter kind of had to move away from Rails due to scalability issues. GameBattles.com also had to back away from Rails after their uptime dropped to 80%. I am not trying to tarnish Rails, I am just curious to learn about some success stories involving Rails at very large scale.

Frameworks don't scale. Architecture does.

From my experience, you can scale a rails app the same way you can scale a django app the same way you can scale a java webapp, and so on. The general problem with frameworks is they try to make you not think about datastore access. Datastore access tends to be the hardest part to scale.

Also, in addition to what others have mentioned, iLike uses (used?) rails - it was a large early facebook application. Not sure what their traffic is like nowadays, but I think it was pretty large in the early days. (Edit: http://blog.ilike.com/ seems to document their growth in registered users all the way back to 2007)

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#58

Post by triathlete »

mmahemoff wrote: post #41

I could write a similar post, having used Node on a couple of projects before nodding to reality and switching back to Rails for a larger project. For a "typical" web project, Rails simply has a ton of mature libraries that don't exist in Node, or are very early days. Sure, there might be a basic data mapper, but does it have support for testing? Automatic counter caching? Workaround on StackOverflow for a hundred th…

The problem is that Rails has been around since what 2005. Node has been around for a much shorter period and has only stabilized over the past year. So they just arent comparible in that sense. Plus node works differently then Rails and i admit it takes time to get used to that.

If you do take the time to learn node though all i can say is its just AWESOME! So lets see how things are when node is 5 years old or so.

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#59

Post by ryan_f »

czzarr wrote: post #47
gfosco wrote: post #32

Basically they switched for... personal opinion. That's all I can really gleam from the post. You can do it all in Node JS, they just didn't want to. Screw all the frameworks, I am working with bare-metal Node and loving every minute.

definitely agree with this. I can understand why 37signals use RoR, because they built it and know it inside out. But for a newcomer diving into rails now is difficult because the ecosystem is so huge it's hard to navigate, and everything is so integrated and you usually end up bundling a ton of thin that you don't need. With node everything is modularized, it is much more easier to understand what's happening under…

I disagree with this. By the ecosystem being huge do you mean the modules and different gems? That in itself is modularized for having the choice not to use them. The availability is what makes it powerful on top of the simplicity to get it all running.

Node is by far not simple for a new developer or new teams running node. Projects tend to drift toward unreadable due to poor design, just try following people's callbacks. I am not saying this is Node's fault but it being young results in developers' lack of experience.

Re: Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

#60

Post by ryan_f »

czzarr wrote: post #47
gfosco wrote: post #32

Basically they switched for... personal opinion. That's all I can really gleam from the post. You can do it all in Node JS, they just didn't want to. Screw all the frameworks, I am working with bare-metal Node and loving every minute.

definitely agree with this. I can understand why 37signals use RoR, because they built it and know it inside out. But for a newcomer diving into rails now is difficult because the ecosystem is so huge it's hard to navigate, and everything is so integrated and you usually end up bundling a ton of thin that you don't need. With node everything is modularized, it is much more easier to understand what's happening under…

I disagree with this. By the ecosystem being huge do you mean the modules and different gems? That in itself is modularized for having the choice not to use them. The availability is what makes it powerful on top of the simplicity to get it all running.

Node is by far not simple for a new developer or new teams running node. Projects tend to drift toward unreadable due to poor design, just try following people's callbacks. I am not saying this is Node's fault but it being young results in developers' lack of experience.

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