Ruby on Rails: Production Ready
Posted by Ben Rometsch on 05 August 2006
Of all the "must have" aspects of a language or framework, from a commercial point of view there is one area that is far and away the most important. It's not the speed of development, or ability to easily refactor code. It's simply this: can I install my application on a server and then leave it for 6 months to run, flawlessly, uninterrupted.
Of course this precludes making sure that there are no critical bugs in the application to begin with, but if the server software running the application is not up to the job, it doesn't matter if your code is 100% correct (a panacea that is almost impossible to achieve anyway).
Of all the things written about Ruby on Rails in the past couple of years, this has been the elephant in the room. Running RoR applications in a production environment was patchy at best, and put simply there was just no agreed stack of services that you could use to employ best practice in this regard.
Well, finally things seem to be moving in the right direction. The arrival of mongrel on the scene has caused a number of things to happen. Firstly, and most importantly, mongrel appears to be rapidly becoming the defacto application server of choice for production environments. Secondly, there is a consensus forming about the best way of hooking up mongrel so that you can scale your production environment as required. Finally, it seems that mongrel has caused the other projects that people were using in production to buck their ideas up and work on improving the quality of their offerings.
All this is a really good thing and leads me to believe that RoR is approaching a tipping point in terms of commercial adoption, taking it out of the garage and into the office.
Solid State Group are about to embark on a pilot project that we will implement in RoR in the very near future. We will hopefully have time to diarise this experience at this blog.