Updated
Well, this puts a bit of a damper on all those good vibes around Ruby on Rails — Twitter may soon dump the application framework in favor of Java or PHP, according to TechCrunch.
With its popularity among the tech crowd, Twitter has been struggling with scaling issues. The group messaging site’s once-frequent problems with downtime have lessened, but it still experienced a caching problem a week ago that made the service virtually useless for an entire weekend. The company may have decided that if it wants to continue growing — without risking further outages that would hurt said growth — Rails wasn’t going to cut it.
These rumors come little more than a week after Twitter announced the departure of its chief architect Blaine Cook, a big Rails fan. For example, here’s a video of Cook giving a presentation on how “Rails Scales” (looks like others in the company may not have agreed).
If this news turns out to be true, it may slow the momentum that Rails development has been building. In the last few months, Benchmark Capital announced investments in Engine Yard and New Relic, two companies related to Rails application deployment and management, and a similar service called Heroku has also gotten a positive response. There are major sites running on Rails too, including Scribd and Hulu. What I’ve been hearing is that Rails has a lot of the excitement of a new technology, but a lot of the uncertainty as well.
Update 1: Interestingly enough, eWeek published an article today about Twitter proving Ruby on Rails’ resilience. Maybe we spoke too soon, or maybe it’s just a case of really, really bad timing …
Update 2: Evan Williams, founder of Obvious (which owns Twitter), says “Twitter currently has no plans to abandon RoR.”
[Image:Free Games News]
6 Comments
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Jay (Twitter @qthrul) said:
Did you get the 500 Server Error too?
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MG Siegler said:
@jay - yep, we’re seeing it on and off over here…
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Ezra said:
Techrunch lies, twitter is not abandoning Rails: http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348
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Grant said:
Sometimes i think rails’ newness has people looking for trouble - of the high-profile sites that i’m aware of running rails, twitter seems to be the only one with issues - and even then, what of twitter’s issues would be called “normal” downtime for a growing internet app if they were running php or another “more acceptable” technology?
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Anthony Ha said:
@Ezra Thanks for pointing that out; I’ve updated the story.
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Suya Sudeli said:
Another (brand new) social networking totally built with RoR : http://www.hollamee.com. RoR ROCKS!!!!!
7 Trackbacks
12:57 pm
Twitter on its architecture: We can rebuild it. We have the technology. » VentureBeat said:
[...] (commenters on this blog and others at least) seem to have a major problem with. There were even rumors that Twitter was going to abandon Ruby on Rails. The service denied those [...]
7:12 pm
Plurk: Twitter meets FriendFeed » VentureBeat said:
[...] look at hiring one Mr. Woon to help solve their user interface issues, even if he can’t help them scale. //OBSTART:do_NOT_remove_this_comment var [...]
11:29 pm
Twitter: Don’t blame Ruby, blame Scoble » VentureBeat said:
[...] lot of commenters on this blog and others are quick to jump on and blame RoR, which has even led to rumors that Twitter was abandoning it. These turned out not to be true, and in fact Twitter will continue to use RoR for the time being [...]
10:35 pm
handling community growing pains » nickbouton.com said:
[...] on a regular basis. Apparently, this causes Twitter to have fits. While many have tried to blame their technology platform, Ruby on Rails, for the scalability issues, Twitter has gone so far as to shift the blame [...]
12:37 pm
Twitter brings in big guns from Pivotal Labs to help rebuild its troubled infrastructure » VentureBeat said:
[...] Twitter, the messaging service that many of us love — and love to complain about when it experiences downtime — has hired a premier software development firm to help it rebuild its infrastructure, we’ve heard and confirmed with the company. The name of the firm is Pivotal Labs, a quiet but impressive group of big-gun, for-hire developers that already counts business software company SalesForce and a long list of startups as clients. From Twitter’s Biz Stone: Yes, we hired some smart folks from Pivotal Labs to join us in the office and get some work done. They start on Monday. We’re hiring full time employees too—there’s plenty of work to go around! San Francisco-based Twitter has had a near chronic problem keeping its site up as it has continued to grow (not unlike ourselves, as our readers may have noticed earlier today). Its chief software architect recently left and the company has been looking at options for rebuilding the site. [...]
6:50 pm
The New York Herald. : Twitter Gets VC Boost, Undisclosed But Est. at $15M said:
[...] should also noted that Twitter rides on Rails, and some have suggested a switch to PHP might help with scaling [...]
10:28 pm
Christophe Lauer, Blog Edition : Infrastructure, plate-forme, disponibilité et levée de fonds said:
[...] évoluer, et embauchez des bons codeurs", ie pour ceux qui ne l’auraient pas compris : abandonnez Ruby on Rails et passez à la plate-forme [...]