Rails - where are the BIG web apps?

Rails
21

Tammy Cravit wrote:

Steven wrote:

keep it stable and running on expensive and beefy hardware yet those
were safe and “mature” technologies at the time. I’ll bet the whole
thing would have worked much better on RoR if it had been around. It

Having been in I.T. professionally for more than a decade, I’ve long
noticed
the corporate bias in favor of “mature” technologies, as though there’s
something magical about the fact that tools are older. Of course, the
newer,
more “immature” tools are developed precisely because of perceived
shortcomings in the older tools, or because alternate ways of looking at
problems have created new solutions. To the extent that newer tools are
developed to overcome perceived shortcomings in the older ones, that
seems
to me a good thing, not something to be fearful of.

If “mature” technologies were always the panacea that some think they
are, I
suspect we’d all be writing Web apps in COBOL or assembler.

– Tammy

The “something magical” is that a decision maker has to cover his/her
butt when making a decision. Executives get promoted for good choices
and fired for bad choices. To minimize risk, if they go with the
gorilla/market leader then they reduce some risk in making technology
decisions. It is the PERCEIVED safe path, not necessarily the best
path. Small, unproven technologies come and go and very few high-up
decision makers want to hedge their bets on the survival of something
that they are investing in.

I’m not suggesting that Rails is “small and unproven” - as I absolutely
love the whole framework and developed an internal CRM application for
our company. I am suggesting that the person who started this thread is
seeking validation from someone, somewhere so that he can SELL this to
his management. He already loves the framework - now he is trying to
help sell it and using the most powerful tool available which is a
proven large account.

Just my opinion! I sure am eager for this to continue adoption in the
corporate world as I could use the consulting $$$! :slight_smile:

Michael
mmodica at cox dot net

22

The original poster seemed to be looking for something he could point
his management to in order to increase their comfort factor that someone
out there is using RoR successfully in a “large-scale” app.

[To anyone:] What would qalifiy as large-scale in your mind? My
current site is used within a professional community and has 10k+
registered users. It is not a consumer site yet and I would consider
this small. But it has to scale to 10x that or more within the next
year. I am comfortable converting this to RoR.

I would love to be able to tell you the site, but I can’t just yet. In
a
month I’ll be able too, I promise :slight_smile:

Right now I’m responsible (well, not just me) for a site spread across
11 front end servers.

And 90% of it is in Rails. A couple (small) pieces are still PHP, but
only cause we haven’t converted them over.

About a week ago we did 3,697,616 pages, 28,294,940 hits, and 255.72GB
of
bandwidth. For July we’ve avereged just under two million pages a day.

There is only one cached page (the home page) since the content
changes too quickly to make page caching useful.

I ran some numbers on the busiest time during that day and figured we
can
easily handle 61,954,728 pages per day with our setup – not that we’ll
need to, but we could.

-philip