Making a backend-centric application

Rails
1

Is Rails usable for a backend/server-centric application? The
application is supposed to just sit there and grab data from various
sources at certain times, process them, stuff them in a database.
These data will then be presented in different ways, via a web-
frontend, webservices (rest), json and such.

Would Rails be a usable way to do this, or should I go a different
route? If so, what route should I go?

Christian

2

Christian Wattengård wrote:

Is Rails usable for a backend/server-centric application? The
application is supposed to just sit there and grab data from various
sources at certain times, process them, stuff them in a database.
These data will then be presented in different ways, via a web-
frontend, webservices (rest), json and such.

Would Rails be a usable way to do this, or should I go a different
route? If so, what route should I go?

Definitely Rails would be simpler than a lot of other choices. Java
would sound more ‘enterprisey’ than Rails. I’d like to hear an answer
to this question also actually. We’re currently doing this kind of
thing as ‘App servers’ written in C++ (currently for Windows with either
SQLite or PostgreSQL). The thing just sits there and collects data and
when someone wants it, it hands out the results, or does some
processing, etc. It’s designed as an HTTP server, so it integrates
rather seamlessly with the rest of the infrastructure, but is more
time-consuming to do… than it would be in Rails. However, it does
give reasonably low memory footprints and because of the way that it is
designed, it scales well with extra CPU power or cores (mostly it’s
stateless, so very few occasions to lock and wait, etc.).

Fortunately, we are not doing much stuff on the output side (where ERB
templates would be great!), so I’m not complaining much. Most of the
output in our cases is either text or XML, but we have one server we
built that does dynamic images).

I know my rambling isn’t helping here, but you’re not alone in that
conundrum.

Cheers,
Mohit.
3/10/2009 | 5:33 PM.