From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-11-11T22:13:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails vs. Asp.Net politics

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Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> I have the deciding vote in a new (rather large) web app we need to
> develop. I am experienced in Rails, but the other 2 guys on the team
> know only C# and very basic Ruby. About 25% of the app could benefit
> from existing classes written in C#.
>=20

Playing devil's advocate, if the rest of the team only really knows C#
and ASP.NET, it might not be wise to be headstrong and put a technology
that you as the minority consider shinier.

However, with the timeframe you mentioned, I think spending some time on
technology evaluation isn't completely out of the question. And it sure
as hell is a better way to find out what technology your team -as a
whole- will be more productive with than getting (undeniably biased)
opinions from here; I consider programmer-language productivity to be
not really an absolute metric, and it's always bound by requirements (if
you had to do something for which a library in Ruby is only very flaky,
that might cause a drop in that, etc.)

Also, performance and scalability issues are also to be considered. If
the bottleneck is in the database, I'd be wary of Rails and ActiveRecord
- the "making things easy" way with which it approaches ORM isn't too
convincing from the performance POV, and you might end up with dropping
down to SQL or low-level operations a lot. If you have someone with
database experience on the team, maybe iBATIS would be a better choice -
divorcing your ORM from your database schema would let you optimize
things on that level easier, if giving up some of the "Oooh! Aaah!"
factor. Either way, if you expect (read: absolutely know, this would be
a horror to rewrite later) that the load will be low, you could just do
a load test to see if ActiveRecord on whichever SQL server you'll be
using is Fast Enough (tm).

David Vallner


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