# Making a backend-centric application

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-a-backend-centric-application/162475>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 10, 2009, 9:48am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-a-backend-centric-application/162475 "2009-03-10T09:48:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ed655f/32.png) [@Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Christian_WattengSS)\
**Post date:** [March 10, 2009, 9:48am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-a-backend-centric-application/162475/1 "2009-03-10T09:48:22Z")

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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

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**Author:** ![Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ed655f/32.png) [@Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Christian_WattengSS)\
**Post date:** [March 10, 2009, 10:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/making-a-backend-centric-application/162475/2 "2009-03-10T10:35:14Z")

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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.