Charlie's comment got me curious about how Rails and CFWheels compare on
some of these issues, so I asked the question over on the CFWheels email
list. That provoked a really interested discussion that I learned from. Here
is one of the best comments:
I hope this helps forward the conversation over here!
Clarke
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of joshua clingenpeel
Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 11:47 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [cfwheels] Re: ActiveRecord Limitations
Twitter really only uses Rails for their frontend anymore. They
rewrote their Starling gem in Scala to improve the resource management
and crash recovery. I haven't heard that Twitter is only using one
'massive database' - that sounds a little absurd, and the Rails
community is still recovering from a ton of bad press from the 'it
can't scale' stories that circulated with Twitters issues. I think you
might want to look into Gizzard
(http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/04/introducing-gizzard-framework-for.ht
ml).
>From what I understand, Amazon's Rails projects have a similar
separation of web and data tiers where Rails handles the former and
they've written custom JRuby modules to interface with the data tier.
Anyway, more to the point -
Wheels is a framework that sits on top of CF, so we're really only
limited to what CF gives us. Rails is a framework on top of Ruby and
is again limited to what components of Ruby you tell it to use.
ActiveRecord2 is little more than a SQL generator with a bunch of
helper methods. A lot of people have been stripping it out in favor of
some other, more robust ORMs in their Rails projects. ActiveRecord3 is
supposed to be much better, but we'll see - one of the nice bits of
Rails3 is that it makes it much easier to NOT use ActiveRecord.
You can have more than one datasource in Rails, but Rails was built to
cover 80% of all application needs - one of the big ones was that an
application typically only needs one database, and changing that
behavior is a pain (I have an app I took over that ended up talking to
a MySQL database and two remote Oracle databases - not much fun).
Wheels was built with this same assumption, but the nature of CF is to
allow multiple datasources with little issue, so Wheels lets you, too.
Now the question about 'restrictions in design that only allow ONE
client to be processed at a time' - that sounds like the issue that
Mongrel by default is a single-threaded process. If ActiveRecord is
bottlenecking behind the scenes, that would be bad, and I'm quite sure
it isn't. Phusion's Passenger is emerging as the standard for Rails
servers, and it's got a managed worker thread pool. The alternative is
to create a Mongrel pack and then a proxy pass in apache with a load
balancer - yuck. But if you look at what CF is doing, you get
multi-threading instantly, and CF9 has a ton of tools for distributing
that load and handling performance issues. To be honest, if you're
experiencing race conditions in dealing with the database, you need to
look at your code first.
On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 7:56 AM, raulriera <[email protected]> wrote:
> You can setup different datasources in Wheels, you do that at the
> model files.
>
> On May 14, 10:50 am, "Clarke Bishop" <[email protected]> wrote:
>> A question came up the morning on the Atlanta Flex Users Group
(AFFUG.com)
>> list regarding Rails versus Hibernate.
>>
>> One of the responses said:
>>
>> I still like the ActiveRecord simple philosophy over HIbernate, but
>> ActiveRecord has one Achilles heel. It assumes a single database, and
while
>> you can play tricks on it to make it move between them it's still kinda
>> tough to do that. Java, on the other hand, doesn't restrict you to just
one
>> database out of the box and so it's more straight forward to do database
>> sharding which is very important if you plan to scale (and continue to
use a
>> database for storage). Twitter still runs on a single database because
of
>> the difficultly in changing after you've already designed your
application
>> to be single DB focused. Furthermore, ActiveRecord has restrictions in
its
>> design that only allow ONE client to be processed at a time. Rails still
>> has the global lock to prevent multiple clients through at once. So you
>> have to use OS processes to service multiple clients at once.
>>
>> So, I'm wondering how much of this applies to CFWheels? We probably are
>> limited to a single database. But, what about the locking to prevent
>> multiple clients? Is that a CFWheels limitation, too?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Clarke
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Charlie Hubbard <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, May 14, 2010 at 9:17 AM
Subject: Re: [AFFUG Discuss] Ruby on Rails vs MVC Spring / Hibernate
To: [email protected]
I've been a long time user of rails, but I've drifted back towards Java
recently because I think I'm more productive in Java. When Rails came out
Java frameworks were pretty bad so using Rails had huge advantages.
However, as time as gone one most of the Java frameworks have been inspired
by Rails' simplicity in one way or another and have mostly made up that gap
between them so Rails is not as productive over Java as it once was.
I still like the ActiveRecord simple philosophy over HIbernate, but
ActiveRecord has one Achilles heel. It assumes a single database, and while
you can play tricks on it to make it move between them it's still kinda
tough to do that. Java, on the other hand, doesn't restrict you to just one
database out of the box and so it's more straight forward to do database
sharding which is very important if you plan to scale (and continue to use a
database for storage). Twitter still runs on a single database because of
the difficultly in changing after you've already designed your application
to be single DB focused. Furthermore, ActiveRecord has restrictions in its
design that only allow ONE client to be processed at a time. Rails still
has the global lock to prevent multiple clients through at once. So you
have to use OS processes to service multiple clients at once.
Then there's the background task item. Rails doesn't have any support for
running background jobs. There are many solutions out there for doing this
in Rails applications, but I found most of them be to pretty horrible
performance wise. And cumbersome to setup - cough Drb. So after I weighed
all of that and looked at Java again. I started to really like Java again.
So my stack I like to use now is:
Jetty or Tomcat
Spring MVC
Sprint JDBC Templates for DB
MongoDB if I can get away from Relational DB
JST4J to replace JSP
ActiveMQ or Quartz for BG Jobs
Charlie
On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 7:13 AM, Eric DeCoff <[email protected]> wrote:
Hey all,
What is everyones opinion on Ruby on Rails vs MVC spring / hibernate?
--
Eric R. DeCoff
Changing the world,
1 line of code at a time
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