Twitter Reportedly May Abandon Ruby On Rails

Raster Burn writes "According to TechCrunch, Twitter has plans to abandon Ruby on Rails after two years of scalability issues. Candidates to replace Rails are said to be PHP, Java, and Ruby without the Rails framework." The post links a brief comment (at 139 characters, probably a tweet) from Twitter founder Ev Williams saying it ain't so. The comments following the post embody the controversy over whether or not RoR sucks.

Does a clean architecture matter?

I have an argument with a coworker frequently about architectural orthogonality vs performance. I fall on the "architecture should be clean and easy to understand and maintain" side of the argument and he falls on the "speed, memory, and response time at all cost" side.

What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles? If the price of that productivity imposes a maximum limit on performance, how much optimization should be undertaken?

It's a hard question to answer. On the one hand employees are expensive and hardware is cheap. On the other hand, you can't simply forego developing for performance just because of some religious belief that architecture should be clean.

Re:Does a clean architecture matter?

While system responsiveness is often a product of optimization, scalability rarely is. When a system can scale across orders of magnitude, it's because of a clean, maintainable architecture that allowed components to be completely revamped and swapped in, identified and eliminated high-polynomial (or worse) growth patterns, and allowed more developers to be spun up on it fast enough to keep up with demand.

On the other hand, if you spend all day pondering the ultimate architecture, you'll never ship and if you do you won't meet requirements. Learning where those tradeoffs are is all about experience and is why the engineers with over a decade of real world experience earn more.

Re:Does a clean architecture matter?

On the other hand, perhaps the bottlenecks are somewhere inside the Rails framework, and the Twitter team thinks that it'd be simpler to move to a new framework than to invest the effort to fix Rails.

That would be the crux of it, as I read it.

The rails framework is aptly named. Its like driving a train. You follow the rails. Its easy, simple, and those are its strengths. But if one day, you decide you want to cut across a field save a few hours of travel, well, you probably shouldn't have chosen 'train' as your mode of transportation.

The simpler and easier a framework is the harder it is to change its behaviour in ways the designers didn't expect. Its like using Microsofts web rendering controls in an application... they are drag and drop simple to use and that's great. But if you want to tweak them so they handle a particular css element in a different way [read standards compliant way], its not going to happen. The -best- you can hope for is to pre-parse the document to rewrite it in a way that the rendering control will get the appearance right, because you are NOT going to change the rendering behaviour itself easily. Better by far to just switch to a different rendering engine.

Conversely the more robust a framework is, and the more hooks they give you to inject/alter behavior, the more complicated and bug-prone it is to develop with.

Rails is a trade off... great when it fits what you need, abysmal when it doesn't. And rails in particular from what I've heard is especially frustrating when its 'oh-so-close-but-not-quite' what you need.

Re:Examples?

Having worked with Rails for a year, I have found listening to people who talk on any web forum about any language draws out nothing but hyperbole. So, I would take most of what is said here with a grain of salt since it is obvious that most of the people commenting here are stating "truths" from religious wars.

The framework operates a multiple levels. At the highest, a complete page can be generated from scaffold that automatically hook model to controller to view. I have found the scaffolds to be lack luster. From a completely database-centric view, there are some neat things that are automatically generated. For instance, verification methods in models are use to display errors on the page and mark input fields in red. My personal experience has found scaffolds to be lackluster.

Most well-designed applications revolve around the application's use, not its internal data representation. Using scaffold strongly ties the interface to data representation which creates the situation that "the user can be wrong." You see this in Microsoft Access databases where you can enter something in or choose options that are mutually exclusive. Because the application lets you see that data, the program generates an error if you are wrong. From what I have seen, the gripe is that the full scaffold is too specific and rigid. Well, duh?! That's the point of each layer of scaffold--to provide a guide for usage.

Personally, I have shunned most of the page scaffolding and tend to rely on creating my own use flow. I use the controllers to present that choices are possible and to manipulate the models as opposed to the common practice of having the controller just load a set of records and pass it to the view (which formats the output). The advantage is that the user is never wrong. Options that are logically inconsistent are never presented. Add to this the ability to monkey-patch (the extension of predefined classes) and lambdas, the code is clean and concise. Both can be used to refactor procedural code into functional code and move it out of the controllers and models. Most importantly, the design allows you to think about what you want to manipulate and then after the fact extend the functionality. A common example of the is the statement:
1.day.from_now
The numeric class is extended in Rails so that you do not have find and use a static date class, but can state simply the desired result.

So, where does it fail miserably? So far, I have not found any great place that it does. It performs as well I need it to serve about a dozen users on a lowly Pentium 4 machine with 256 megs of RAM. So far, the application has been 99% maintenance free. A date verification package I am using had a Feb 29th bug in it. The cool thing is that since I can see the source, I could fixed it. Perhaps there are issues with scaling, but from what I understand, the system was designed around a non-centric design. In theory, a correctly designed application should be able scale horizontally.

Given that there are other high-profile, high-use web sites written in Rails that do not suffer from Twitter's issues, I am left thinking that its failure in general looking for a specific reason. Rails has been very stable and easy to extend, but then I write for maintenance and ignore hype.

Ruby Can't Scale

And for all those Ruby people in denial to the fact that people have been saying this for years, here is your proof yet again. Of course I will be marked down as being a troll for pointing this out by the RUBY comunity but it is time that they acknowledge the inherent achilles heel of the language.

Re:Ruby Can't Scale

They're complaining that the framework can't scale. Not the language.

Please refrain from commenting when you don't know what you're talking about. The desire to stir up a flamewar is not sufficient justification.

Hype vs. reality... again.

Rails was the cat's pajamas two years ago. The future. The in-thing. Revolutionary. Exciting. Radical. Amazing!

Then like so many similar times before, reality set in. It turned out to be buggy, unstable, less performant, and heavily dependant upon an evangelical base.

Ruby the language is interesting. Not my personal cuppa, but I have nothing against it. Rails, however... After having analyzed it and developed a prototype application for my company, I came to realize that there are other frameworks out there that are more worthwhile, epecially in an enterprise environment. The problems I've seen Twitter experience only solidify this.

If you are doing green-field development Rails should probably not be your first choice. Yes, Rails is interesting. No, it is not the end-all-be-all, and it certainly has some rather major warts.

Re:Hype vs. reality... again.

Standard prologue: I work at yellowpages.com, a Rails site that gets millions of searches a day. The site went from 125,000 lines of Java to around 14,000 lines of Ruby and shrinking. For more details, see our presentation at RailsConf.

Buggy? I have no idea what you're talking about. Since going 1.0, I've run into one non-critical bug in the framework. I wrote a patch in an hour, which was quickly accepted by Rails Core.

Unstable? The framework is backed by solid test suite. Patches are only accepted if they have tests to back them up. But maybe you just meant to say "buggy" again.

Less performant? Yes, Ruby is slower than Java. If you're folding chromosomes, choose a different language. However, the real bottleneck in most sites is the database.

Evangelical base? I'll gladly tell you the technical issues of Rails. Nobody brings them up. Instead they repeat something from a coworker who read a blog post by a java guy.

The problems you see with twitter have about zero to do with Rails. Rails serves their website, not their service tier. The majority of their traffic goes through their API. They said this at RailsConf last year.

Their problem is twitter is not a web app. It's a network. They're using a database as a router.

While you've done one prototype, I've lost count of the Rails projects I've put into production for myself, for consulting, and now every day in the "enterprise." Most are green-field projects, and they are consistently delivered faster, with fewer developers, and of higher quality than past projects on other platforms.

The problem is ruby

The problem is Ruby. It is a very slow language (http://www.blognone.com/node/4385). My tests confirm it is 20 times slower than python in simple loops. Java is a dinosaur and PHP is not easy to maintain. I would go with Django or web2py. If they use web2py (http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu), I will help them. web2py scales very well because allows you to bytecode compile the models, the controllers and the views (so there is no parsing when serving a page) and cache every function in ram.

Yes, in fact, RoR DOES suck (WARNING: RANT.)

Pardon the off topic rant (please feel free to mod appropriately), but I have to agree that RoR DOES SUCK. (At least I didn't set up my own blog just to rant about it.) The RUBY language is the best thing since sliced bread, but Rails isn't. And I'm not talking about the installation and management issues like everyone else. I mean from a developer's perspective, RoR is horrible. Here's why:

1) Automated copy-n-paste is still copy-n-paste
Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files from the distribution into the app directory it creates. How do you upgrade? Painfully, that's how. I have numerous small applications that break when I upgrade rails and it's dependencies because the copied files don't work with the newer version. My applications should be 100% code I write directly. Everything else should be kept separate and accessed via includes so emerge/apt/yum/gem dependencies can keep the rails code compatible with itself and I never have to "fix" code I didn't write.

2) RoR gives you the 1% that's used 10% of the time, not the 10% that's used 90% of the time.
So you set up a RAILS app, create your database table, and run 'generate' to get your pseudo-MVC (seen #4 below). You've got everything you need to edit a single table via the web, but that's not even close to an application. It probably saved me about 1/2 of setting things up by hand. That's simply not good enough. It should be able to create an app that supports validation (both JS and server-side for obvious stuff like numeric and lengths), sorting, filtering, searching, relationships, and css skins. It could do this just from the information available in the database metadata, which would get you 90% done. And a huge number of simple apps could be completed simply by writing a custom CSS skin and adding some graphics.

3) No UI components, which are the hardest part of web development.
Most of what rails does buy you is the back-end stuff. It's an easy way to get stared with ActiveRecord, which does the heavy SQL lifting. AR, the one shining gem of RoR, is a great object-relational model and I believe it is responsible for 99% of RoR's popularity. But SQL isn't that complicated in the first place. The real tough part of web development is getting rich, graphical, reusable UI components that work across web browsers. Prototype/Scriptaculous are a wonderful starting place, but I need code that I can feed an AR class (and possibly a list of columns and/or related tables+columns) that will generate cross-browser compatible HTML view of the table complete with searching, sorting, filtering, and paging. There could be functions/objects that render it as a table, a list, a tree, etc. You're probably thinking I should just use .NET and it's various components, but I don't want to work on Windows, I don't want to work with IIS, I don't want to write VB or C#, and .NET really does a bad job of layouts and makes a lot of other stuff more complicated. And it's ORM simply can't touch ActiveRecord. Rails does only a tiny amount of what it could and should.

4) It's NOT MVC
The Model-View-Controller design pattern is about limiting the amount of communication necessary by having one instance of some code (the controller) that all access to data (the model) from other code (the views) goes through. Views subscribe to a model, get their data and then do their thing without worrying about other views. If some other view changes the model, the controller notifies all other subscribed views of the change. Rails MVC is something totally different that doesn't solve the same problem. Rails does provide data validation via AR, which is part of true MVC, but it still misses the point of MVC, which is a coherent and always up to date set of views into the model. In fact, an MVC is impossible to implement over the web because communication is one way: the browser must initiate all communication with the web server. (For those that don't "get" this,

Re:What is Twitter?

Twitter is a major site, even if you yourself have never heard of it, with many tens of thousands of users. As such it is felt by many to by *the* flagship RoR application. Unfortunately it has suffered from numerous outages, some of these lasting days at a time.

Re:What is Twitter?

In my day, we had talk, finger, vi, and elm and we never complained! Green vt100 terminals were all anyone really needed! Get off of my lawn!

Seriously, talk had advantages over IM. You actually could see what the other person typed as they typed it, including backspaces...

And finger worked great. I knew a nerd that had his .plan updated automatically to show where he physically was logged in. As if anyone cared?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Re:What is Twitter?

Twitter is a site popular with a small coterie of techies who talk about it incessantly, but which no normal person would ever use.

Fixed that for you.

Re:What is Twitter?

twitter is a microblogging system.
You can twitter from your cell or PC.
I think it is one of the most usless things on the face of the earth but it seems popular for some strange reason.

Re:What is Twitter?

I think it is one of the most usless things on the face of the earth but it seems popular for some strange reason.

Most popular things are useless.

Re:What is Twitter?

See Hilton, Paris

Re:What is Twitter?

and digg, reddit. Not slashdot though.

Re:What is Twitter?

Or you could just email them all.

Unless you are claiming there are a substantial percentage of folks who use twitter but don't use email. I'll want citations for that though, because I don't believe it for a minute.

Re:What is Twitter?

They have figured out how to monetize it.

Actually, all of these free social networking services have figured out how to monetize it.

Twitter is the honeypot to collect a group of users. After a density of users is reached, larger communication companies will start looking at purchasing Twitter so they can "integrate" their service. Nevermind that integrating a free service with an available API doesn't require purchase.

What the larger company is actually doing is buying customers.

From the TOS:

Business Transfers Twitter may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy. You will have the opportunity to opt out of any such transfer if the new entity's planned processing of your information differs materially from that set forth in this Privacy Policy.

Build Service - Grow Userbase - Sell Demographic data.

It's the web 2.0 business model, all coated in a lovely veneer of altruistic "doing it for the love of geekiness" bullshit.

According to Penny-Arcade:

This [penny-arcade.com] is what Twitter is for.

Re:What is Twitter?

Personally I would never run a high volume site on top of a scripting language platform. While RoR is pretty nice on getting a site up and running and integrated with a database, it is still poor in the scalability department.

For a medium to large site they should consider using servlets and java and avoid J2EE.

For a very large site I would recommend C/C++ and maybe java if they have the budget for hardware.

The toughest part is getting developers that can code webapps (not just CGIs) in C/C++ (while easy to do C/C++ developers overall are hard to find and are not as cheap as ruby/perl/python ones and even java ones; this is from experience of trying to hire them). So they should check their developer base and see what is the fastest language they feel very comfortable with and go with it. From experience they may have to settle for java since that will provide them a large pool to pick developers from and the learning curve is slightly less steep than C/C++.

I suspect they fell into the trap of building a demo fast using RoR and then just going with it into production, I have seen this way too many times unfortunately.

Re:I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner

You're obviously underestimating the amount of effort it takes to store usernames, passwords, and phone numbers in a database, then associate them with messages no more than 120 characters in length.

Re:I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner

That sounds like advanced stuff to me.

On an unrelated note, is anyone here good with hello world programs? Mine keeps crashing.

Re:I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner

I'm fairly certain your problem is trying to talk to the whole world at once. Your computer program's seeing that, and it's trying to yell too loud. Try doing "Hello user" and see if that helps.

Re:There's a whole monty python sketch for this sh

it's a conversation starter for people who enjoy arguing.

No it isn't.