Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I run Rails -- minimally six processes of memory chewing lovin' at any time, plus the assorted DBs and cache stores -- and spend, oh, call it $2,000 a year more on my 1.5GB VPS than I would need to for equivalent functionality for Java.

I get a metric truckload more than $2k of developer productivity out of using Rails instead of Java, though.

If my traffic increased such that I needed 40 Mongrels and 20 Delayed Job workers and I was spending $20k a year on hosting, I'd... I'd... I'd really, really like if that happened, actually.

View on HN

But he's not saying "we should all switch to Java to save on hosting costs." He's saying he wants it to be fast and still be Rails.

As much as the extra $2k of hosting is worth the productivity boost, wouldn't you love it if you could have the Rails productivity and save that $2k/year compared to current Rails performance?

I've recently started toying with the Play Framework, a Rails-alike written in Java. The other Java web development tools I'd seen all primarily featured a suffocating bureaucracy, but this one pulled a number of tricks to appear almost as concise as Ruby. My take-away was that Java didn't have to be as repetitive as I'd thought, just that most of the Java libraries were written to encourage that. Maybe that's easier to make Java more productive than Ruby more efficient.

Play is indeed awesome...and extremely fast when compared to Rails.

See discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380732

I'm curious if people who say they're using some Java framework for the speed in place of some Ruby framework. which they would prefer for the language, know about JRuby?

And if they do, why not use the Ruby app of choice under JRuby? Pretty much all of the dozen+ Ruby Web frameworks can be bundled up as WAR files and dropped off for Glassfish (or tomcat or whatever) to handle.

If you look at the results in the link I posted, you'll see that Play ends up being 6 times the speed of Rails. I know about JRuby and have used it much, but that sort of speed improvement can't be ignored, especially considering how close Play comes to making Java beautiful...

Very interesting. Thanks.

Almost missed seeing the Snap and Play stats because the preformatted text was getting formated into a side-scrolling pane.

Not that I want to code in Java, but the speed is impressive.

Still, I have to wonder what the JRuby speed would be for some of the other Ruby frameworks that are faster than Rails, such as Ramaze and Sinatra. (I doubt they would beat those Play numbers, but they would still do better than Rails. A Duby version of Ramaze might rock.)

Doing this at current job. Deploying Ruby on Rails as a WAR on Tomcat. I'd argue it's one of the fastest way to deploy especially using Warble. Also the speed is not too shabby either.

Have you tried running Rails under JRuby + Glassfish?

have you? How does it run?

Fast. I initially had some set-up issues making sure the MySQL jars were found and tweaking Glassfish settings.

Also, development of Ruby + Glassfish almost always meant Rails + Glassfish. I prefer Ramaze, and had to hack a few things (in warbler, for example, and the glassfish3 gem) to get around some things that that assumed you were using Rails.

If you are using one of the anointed frameworks (i.e. Rails or Sinatra) you're probably OK. If you are coloring outside the lines you may have issues. But I've not looked into it much since I got my site running (though now I'm just running it as a rackup app through jruby)

At this point though I'm looking at using Haskell when speed is a concern. But that's a whole other thread ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com