Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjohns | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest, though I have my issues with Java, I've been following along with James Gosling as he's transitioned through different projects and I have to agree with one thing that I think really differentiates Java from newer languages--when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast. It doesn't make it easy, but then again, the solution to difficult and large problems wasn't going to be easy to begin with.

View on HN

> when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast.

The core Twitter service is still a Rails app though. There is nothing inherit to a language that makes it scale better than another, but different languages are better suited to different problems. As a result, Twitter does make use of Java in some capacity, but they also use a plethora of other languages where they make the most sense.

I'm not familiar with scaling Java, but I've worked with the language itself on Android. What makes it so great for scalability as opposed to something like Ruby?

If you are using Rails, the database is the problem 99% of the time, not Ruby. MySQL can easily* be scaled / denormalised / sharded then if you need to you can just horizontally scale your app servers.

(*As easy as MySQL can. It isn't a black magic though, there is plenty of documentation, e.g. http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com