Top Sites Built with Ruby on Rails | Hacker News Reader

Top Sites Built with Ruby on Rails

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42 pointsdanso49 comments

Define Ruby on Rails. At that scale don't you have to transition your model layer from ActiveRecord to a service layer that sits on top of your databases? Certainly at that scale you are going to be using many different types of databases to store different types of data.

Maybe it can be defined as the core-front-end is using ActiveRecord (or a NoSQL equivalent) to do most of the DB interaction and the Rails controller and routing mechanisms?

By that standard, Twitter wouldn't count (and it isn't on this list), just as Twitter shouldn't be on a Top 10 Drupal sites list since only the dev docs are in Drupal.

gem 'rails'

@Scribd we built https://github.com/kovyrin/db-charmer to manage multiple model connections to separate servers/databases.

Rails != ActiveRecord

This isn't rocket science. You start your project rails new foo. You include gem 'rails' in your Gemfile. You're a rails application. How you architect for growth is beside the point.

I had a sales meeting with a large IT company a week ago and they said that if we licensed them our product, they would want to do a re-write in Java if the product (currently Rails based) proved to be effective. My app is for physician use, so there could only theoretically be _at most_ less than 1000000 users, so "at scale" wouldn't be so huge, relatively. Any ideas as to why this company was thinking this way?

Misunderstanding about the performance bottle necks of RoR and desire to prematurely optimize.

Possible interfacing with ancient legacy datasources? Only one I could think of. Well that and the head honchos hadn't followed tech since the digital storage mediums for medical data was Access and Excel, and Java was considered "new".

Simple. Maybe they were a JAVA-shop?

Yep. Java=serious enterprise software, and they've got all their IT organization built on IBM servers running J2EE Enterprise Java Bean containers and they actually understand it, or at least think they do. Rails=toy hacker stuff, and scary because they don't know what it is.

we are considering groovy and grails for this sort of reason. I work with lots of enterprise clients who won't consider anything on premises thats not .net or java.

They won't run Linux-based software but they'll buy into a programming language called "Groovy"! ... LOL ...

why not jruby and rails? rails has a lot more of a community, and you'd still get to run it on java.

I use groovy and grails at work and the only similarity of grails and rails is name.

Grails is a Jvm clone of Rails, and Groovy of Ruby.

I was under the impression that grails is a clone of rails (I think it was actually called rails at one point and they were asked to rename it), but not that groovy is a clone of ruby - I think they have drawn a lot of inspiration from ruby and python, but not that it is a jvm version of ruby - but someone please correct me if im wrong. It seems like it is more about being a scripting version of java itself.

Groovy starte d off that way under James Strachan, but when Graeme Rocher took Groovy over for Grails, he added a MOP just like Ruby's.

Actually, JRuby is a JVM clone of Ruby. And Ruby on Rails on JRuby is a JVM clone of Rails.

I don't know where to start with the differences but Grails is nothing like Rails. The ORM, the naming conventions, configuration, GSPs vs ERB, the way routing works, and pretty much everything else is different. They both use MVC and Grails draws inspiration Rails but is it in no way a clone.

Grails was originally called Groovy on Rails.

Considering the type of information that would be stored in an application for use by physicians, they might be considering Java due to the number of security issues found in Rails as compared to the number of security issues found in something like Spring over the past several years.

Why don't they consider something like JRuby? It's proven, and allows Ruby to run in the JVM, given Java 7's improved support for dynamic runtime.

Instead of full rewrite, migrate to JRuby. From sysadmin standpoint, an rails app running on JRuby is java. so you can submit .WAR file to them & they can deploy it like a normal java app running on the JVM.

Groupon runs RoR and has many tens of millions of users.

I thought Gilt Group (Gilt, Jetsetter) and Living Social were both pretty Rails-heavy.

Also, Shopify should be considered since they power tons of stores on separate sites.

Seems like that article missed A LOT of sites running on RoR.

The domain name should have told us that.

Nice list but if you include off-homepage usage by the top sites then you get massive companies like

Amazon studios.amazon.com

Twitter support.twitter.com

Weather feedback.weather.com

Go sportsnation.espn.go.com

AT&T insider.att.com

Target weeklyad.target.com

Imgur store.imgur.com

Photobucket support.photobucket.com

Shameless plug - all found at http://builtwith.com

IIRC, Hulu is RoR.

LivingSocial? Groupon? Shopify?

I thought Twitter was always the canonical example for a large Ruby on Rails app. Although these days it's splintered into a very large variety of different technologies, I believe Rails is still in the mix somewhere.

Nope, their entire stack is JVM based now.

That wouldn't exclude JRuby though

I know they're not using JRuby

That's not the move they made; they moved to Scala. Their original Rails app couldn't scale. They now use Rails on the front end, but the real data isn't Rails. This has been written about extensively:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-tw...

http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10...

The newer link doesn't mention them using Rails anymore. It's probably still in use in some internal apps, but the main twitter.com site should be 100% Scala now.

No, I asked to an engineer last month and their still using their 'Monorail' for twitter.com

Not entire stack, they are still using some parts of the original monorail app in their stack.

This was true as of July 2013. Source: A Twitter Engineer working on the Tweets Service inside their mothership SoA Application.

I believe the front-facing Twitter.com is all Scala, but a lot of their internal and smaller sites are RoR.

Thought it was the other way around: RoR still exists in the UI but they transitioned to Scala due to all the outages they had 3-5 years ago.

I spoke to an engineering manager at Twitter a few months ago. While he did not definitively say that "all" front-facing code is in Scala, when I asked him where does Twitter still use Ruby on Rails, he said something along the lines of "We still use Ruby on Rails for internal tools," which would imply that the main Twitter app is mostly/all Scala.

Would the backend operations be part of that? Stuff like indexing, caching, database maintenance, etc

I can reasonably assume that those tasks are not what he meant by "internal tools." When someone talks about "internal tools," they are referring to stuff like internal dashboards. Other hypothetical examples: 1) internal bug tracker, 2) a custom CRM for a company's sales team, 3) an internal message board, 4) a conference room scheduler, 5) a dashboard to view the health of a service, etc etc.

I think it's worth noting that sky.fm is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so I am guess they are running Rails too, or are planning to switch to it!

Sorry, this list doesn't sound correct at all. "Sites built with Ruby on Rails": maybe. "Top sites": nope.

From the article:

> Out of curiosity (and for fun!) we’ve recently used Alexa - a web traffic reporting platform - to discover the top ten sites built using Ruby on Rails framework.

It clearly defines "top sites" as those listed from Alexa. In which case, it is correct.

In that case, Flipkart should also be there.

Don't forget basecamp.com, the guys who started it all

rails app -> https://translate.twitter.com/home

Bloomberg.com

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