Is RoR enterprise ready?

[PMichaud]

As a developer, I'm pretty much sold on the idea that RoR is neato and worth using to develop web applications. My question is whether the technology is enterprise ready in the way that the defacto enterprise platforms are (like .net, for example). Can it handle what an enterprise app can handle, like scaling to massive proportions, and being fast enough to handle mounds of data and concurrent users?

I'm just starting to get ruby into my brain, and it's cool, but is it appropriate for very large web apps, or just medium to small size/complexity apps?

[Speeple]

IMO, isn't grand at scaling for large projects. At the enterprise level it certainly wouldn't be my suggestion.

http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-que...er-alex-payne/
http://www.brandonwerner.com/2007/04...ls-cant-scale/
http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/a...g_rails_t.html

[vgarcia]

Can it handle what an enterprise app can handle, like scaling to massive proportions, and being fast enough to handle mounds of data and concurrent users?

http://twitter.com/ - tens of thousands of short messages being passed along, inserted, and displayed every single second.

Ruby's willing to scale as long as you're willing to pay for it.

[Speeple]

It was a twitter developer that actually criticised Ruby's ability to scale well.

[Fenrir2]

Let's face it: you aren't going to develop applications that have to scale to "massive proportions". I'd be more interested in getting a small app out fast.

[ruby-lang]

For internal apps, heck yeah. The hard part is getting management approval, IME.

[PMichaud]

Let's face it: you aren't going to develop applications that have to scale to "massive proportions". I'd be more interested in getting a small app out fast.

Who isn't? The app I write for the company I work for has about 2000 concurrent users pulling from like 10 different database clusters, it pulls terrabytes of data per month, I think that's fairly massive.

[Hostpitable]

and that app runs on what language exactly?

[PMichaud]

ASP.NET (C#) 2.0 with a SQL Server 2005 backend.

[Fenrir2]

Yep, that's fairly massive, cool

I think you're better off using a faster language for apps like this, or at least for the buzy parts. Ruby can scale, but you have to throw more hardware at it.

[mattdidcoe]

The question is a very open one - how big is enterprise?. When we look at the way Rails scales, people instantly bring up the Twitter example and scream "it doesn't scale, it doesn't scale!"

But let's take a look locally, 88Miles, by our very own Ruby on Rails Sitepoint blogger Myles Eftos (madpilot) and iseekgolf.com.au are both example of sites that have scaled and do manage well.

iseekgolf does millions of hits a day when there's a golf tournament on and Matt Allen, the coder behind that site has done well to manage it with caching and other things.

Twitter is a terrible example to use when looking at RoR in a scaling sense, as there aren't many sites that have to handle that amount of hits a day.

[suresk]

I don't know that the definition of "enterprise" relies wholly, or even largely, on how many users per second or whatever metric like that you want to use. I know of plenty of multi-million dollar web applications that rarely, if ever, have more then 2 or 3 users using them at the same time. Yet, they have special requirements such as high-uptime, data integrity over multiple databases (two-phase commit), special monitoring requirements, etc..

Even though Ruby is slow and doesn't scale as easily as other platforms, I think it is still doable. I think some of the other enterprise requirements are a little ways off though.