Floyd’s Thoughts…

I’m not sure who coined the phrase “Rails can’t scale”? but its on of those things that amazingly keeps coming up, particularly when you talk to people in the corporate world who for some reason have it as the stock answer to any rails related discussions.

Anyway this is my Open Source answer to that statement, so please if anybody asks you “can rails scale” or makes the statement “Rails can’t scale!” please feel free to use this answer…

Applications built in rails are actually as capable of scaling as apps built in any other language (or on top of any other framework), in fact rails out-of-the-box is good enough for 99.9% of the applications you will ever write, and that tiny amount of apps that will have problems would have the same problems in ANY other language or framework. The benefits of Rails as a framework and Ruby as a language (Like Productivity, Maintainability, Developer Engagement, Mapping to an Agile Process) should in every case be considered over any notion of scaling issues. In fact if your app doesn’t have 8 million concurrent users right now, don’t worry about scaling at all, your wasting time that could be better spent getting 8 million users.

Now this answer doesn’t touch the real issue with this question but in my experience it is good enough to satisfy the type of people who ask this question.

The only exception where i wouldn’t use this answer is if the question (or statement) comes from a “Technical Architect” in a large corperate who is paid 6 figures a year to keep a development team of 100+ moving forward, if he says “Rails can’t scale” Punch him between the fucking eyes, because he should know better.

The truth, is of course that, anybody who says this knows f-all about software architecture and in fact shouldn’t be in a position where they have an audience to spout their nonsense.

Best Buy has received much acclaim for its IdeaX platform over the last year, and rightly so. For anyone who isn’t away of IdeaX its an Idea Gathering application that allows Best Buy to capture ideas and comments from customers and staff members, which can then be voted or commented on buy other customers or staff members. The basic idea is that good ideas will organically rise to the top as votes and comments increase the “score” given to an Idea. Best Buy can then take a “good” idea and make it into a reality.

Idea Gather Applications (also known as Idea Management Apps) are not a new thing, many American corporates have already embraced this concept including Google and Dell, and while each have great apps the Best Buy IdeaX platform stands head and shoulders about the competition.

While browsing Hacker News the other day i noticed a post saying that the Best Buy IdeaX platform has been open sourced! This is a great step for Best Buy, Come on, a big non-tech US corporate releasing an Open Source product!!! its unheard of! Whats more the app is written in Ruby on Rails, which in its self is a massive step for a big corporate who would traditionally have written apps like this in C# or Java.

Check out the project home page for the full story, and be sure to take a look around the code

The project does take some getting going, you have to me using Postgress and be sure to check out the mad Postgress Specific stuff going on in the migrations. I plan on getting a version of it up and running on EC2 over the next few days (time permitting) so I will issue some instructions in a later post.

All I can say is Hat Tip to Best Buy, Great job!