Is Ruby on Rails the next Java? Benchmark Capital thinks so. It just invested $3.5 million in Engine Yard, taking its entire series A round. Ruby on Rails is an increasingly popular Web application programming environment because it is dead-simple, open-source and very fast to develop on. The downside is that it is not always as robust as more mature frameworks such as Java.
In fact, Ruby on Rails is getting a lot of the same criticisms that Java got in its early days. Namely, that it can’t handle millions of users or handle huge transaction loads. “Everybody considers it a great prototyping language, but not serious enough for enterprise quality environments,” notes Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky. But Engine Yard wants to change all of that by providing a hosted environment for Ruby-on-Rails apps that is is stable, kept up to date, and lets the applications scale to millions of users. Combine that with the simplicity of Rails, and Lasky thinks he has a winner:
Rather than it being top-down the way Java was, Rails has grown up out of the grass roots of the programming community. Rails allows you to innovate and iterate so rapidly that it has accelerated the rate of innovations.
Rails is making it fun to program Web apps again. Java is not fun. Happy programmers are productive programmers.
Engine Yard wants to be to Ruby on Rails what Red Hat is to Linux. By figuring out the best, enterprise-class implementation of Ruby on Rails, and keep it maintained, its customers don’t have to worry about it. Engine Yard already hosts Ruby on Rails apps for 250 customers, including Kongregate and divisions of several Fortune 500 companies. Competition could come on the hosting side from companies like Joyent, and on the technology side from Sun’s own JRuby initiative, which is a Java implementation of the Ruby programming language.
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dude, u really don’t know jack… the biggest criticism of rails is that it is sloooooooow….
Agreed - it’s never been about scalability because there’s an easy answer - add more hardware. Just hope you have deep pockets
Speed issues are being addressed by a few different groups e.g. Rubinius, JRuby and the next version of Ruby itself.
And even that is changing dramatically with JRuby and Ruby 1.9
So, Engine Yard basically is…a hosting service…offering Rails only? I wonder what they will be doing when the Rails hype is over or at least ebbing away? Locking yourself into a technology that serves as specific a purpose as Rails doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me, especially as the Java community seems to catch up on this one, too. Just try out Grails: http://grails.codehaus.org . This framework offers everything Rails does and then some (besides, as I said, it is based on Java, which allows you to make use of the vast amount of Java packages available and to build upon a proven technology that outperforms Ruby).
@Erick: Comparing Rails to Java is a way off track, Java is a runtime environment and a programming language while Rails is a Web stack / framework.
Rails is slow ?? Not for me, it just depend on what kind of deployment you have….
This is a big news story for the community. A lot of people have been taking advantage of Zed’s rant to vent their anger lately, but in the long run it won’t make a bit of difference. http://www.infoq.com/news/2008.....three-five
Engineyard is a hotbed of ruby (not rails) creativity, being the nucleus of two very important projects; Rubinius and Merb.
The press release you wrote this from is not telling you the important things.
With JRuby… Ruby/RoR is not anymore slow!! I think it will be as fast as anything running on the JVM. Its simplicity and fun is the USP of Ruby and I’m sure it’ll be very good for web programming.
Rails is not slow, it is just slower than comparable Java frameworks and you run into scalability issues earlier. This must also be the reason why Engine Yard is focussed on clustering so much.
Note that BenchMark [Balderton] is also in the capital of TouchLocal ( http://www.touchlocal.com), which UK directory and community is entirely built in Rails !
Having met the Engine Yard guys and seen them handle the hosting for a company I was on the board for I’m not surprised Benchmark made this investment. While hosting can be a low-margin business the approach that Engine Yard is taking is more solid from a business model perspective. With web hosting no one’s perfect but these guys have the reputation for being the “gold standard” in the space and this investment should only help to solidify that.
Of course Ruby is slow. But the benefits of Rails (Time to market, time to change etc.) will outsmart any other features of any other development platform.
But the real question is this: Why it is priced more than $300 per month? Thats pricey.
Ok, now I’m waiting that someone do the same with Django http://www.djangoproject.com
And If it happens, we could really say that this framework is fast, see http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/ra.....erformance
Just a quick note that you should be comparing Java to Ruby, and Hibernate/Struts to Rails…the core languages are Java and Ruby (and yes you can do just about anything in either)…the web frameworks for each have their own ups and downs (merb is another framework with the language behind the scenes being Ruby).
Otherwise, it’s an interesting and timely tidbit as DHH just posted about Rails and shared hosting on his blog as well ( http://www.loudthinking.com ).
“Rails is making it fun to program Web apps again. Java is not fun. ”
I would disagree with that statement, I program in Java and very much enjoy it. Whether a language is fun or not is up to the developer… I find C programming not to be fun, but i’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would disagree with me with valid arguments.
I do see Ruby/Rails here for the long run, but i don’t see Java going away either, reason being that the java community isn’t just sitting back and keeping the language stagnant….it is being improved and updated with some of the same functionalities and rapid development features Ruby and other languages are bragging about.
Liked the slices idea. Is there a clustured/shared enviourment built for php?
When I said Rails is very fast, I meant it is a fast development environment, not necessarily that the apps themselves run any faster. I have clarified that in the post.
@Kevin, you are technically correct. I was trying to simplify things for the average (non-programmer) reader, and in fact the Ruby on Rails vs. Java comparison is how Benchmark VC Mitch Lasky put it to me. It is not a perfect analogy, but it does help frame the debate.
If I got any of my other terminology wrong, my apologies. I had about 30 minutes to write this post (and no, I did not write it from the press release. I actually interviewed the VC. Imagine that).
This move may not be about rails at all. The guys at Engineyard have their own ruby framework called Merb (Mongrel + erb), and they heavily promote a webserver called nginx.
Both of them are presently open source, but who is to say they will not change that?
@Erick. Applications run fast and scale easily only in PHP due its stateless nature. Engine Yard will have a though time as scaling Rails as the main problem is Ruby’s poor performance.
You can find superior development speed on the PHP port of Rails Akelos (http://akelos.org). Working on stateless mode in Rails (ie. when development) is really SLOOOW and painful, while on PHP is dam fast and using Akelos you have +90% Rails functionality.
I’ve used Engine Yard for therealdeal.com for almost a year now , they truly are the gold standard, and are well deserving of this investment.
Congrats to them!
Engine Yard has two major things going for it beyond being a ‘rails hoster’ which is why i think they managed to pull in a VC round.
First they are the sponsor of Rubinius, a ruby engine, the major alternative to jruby if you want something which didn’t come from matz.
They also are the creators of Merb, which is an alternative MVC framework created to be faster lighter, and more agile than rails.
If Fortune 500’s want take the risk on C#, because it is to “new” why do you think they will embrace Rails… bad idea
Their pricing is likely going to burn them… Of course, they’ll have burnt thru a whole lotta moolah before anyone realizes that.
Knew about Ruby/RoR/etc from early 2005, just don’t see widespread adoption yet in the enterprise space.
With $3.5M in the bank, they are likely to lower their prices, and if they are smart, go down the utility priced route of Amazon.
Personally I’ve never been a big fan of RoR. I’ve tried working in it a few times, and I guess that I just don’t jive with the whole concept of Rails. If anything, I found myself getting frustrated at it.
Of course, it could just be that I’m not accustomed to the paradigm it represents, and I’m not willing to let go of the way I’m used to working on web-apps, y’know?
Looks like Rails will even get slower as Engine Yard becomes a bloat whore.
That’s too bad. Oh well.. still nice to see the interest.
I love the San Fran office though — it looks nice for a beginning venture. The motorcycle parked out front is a nice touch too!
Congrats on the venture guys and good luck.
http://www.gabbr.com
Congrats to Tom, Ezra, and the rest of the EY team. Ever since we switched to Engine Yard at Bleacher Report, our performance has improved by leaps and bounds and our developers have been free to focus on development without getting bogged down in systems and deployment issues. EY is a great service for any startup-on-Rails, and their support is excellent.
I sure hope people are looking for any potential security vulnerabilities in Ruby and not jamming this through to the public like java and javascript. There are so many holes that could have been plugged but were not.
-Richard
http://www.theflipboard.com
To the people complaining about the pricing, you should realize that Engine Yard is a full-service hosting provider. For smaller operations (like my own) Engine Yard does the work that would otherwise require a fulltime System Administrator. Therefore, in many situations, I believe they’re actually a bargain.
Happy EY client,
Obie Fernandez
Hmm, is there any top 10 site written in Ruby? I wonder why. Ruby is slow, and with Rails it’s even slower. As far as business apps go, most are written in J2EE and .Net, so I’m not sure what Ruby will be doing here.
As far as development speed, that mainly depends on the programmer and curcumstances.
But congrats to EY for persuading VCs to cough up. That’s a feat worthy of praise.
I hope people are aware that scalability issues go way beyond the language and framework. Scalability fails with the weakest link and many times, a site is slow because the database has grown way too big and scaling up has hit the limits. To blame all scalability problems on Ruby on Rails is like a blind man holding onto an elephant’s tail and saying that an elephant is a thin wiry spineless animal.
The costs of paying someone, or worse a team of people, to write in .Net is ten times higher than any additional hardware required to make RoR perform. Slices at SliceHost or the Engine Yard are dirt cheap. Some .Net programmer who has a $4000 a month mortage and two kids in college is expensive.
Write your app in RoR - 4 hours at $100 an hour ( $400 )
All the hardware you need to have your RoR serve millions of users at The Engine Yard - $4000 a year max.
Write your app in .Net - 12 weeks at $100 an hour ( $192,000 )
Licensing fees to Microsoft for your in house Windows server ( $30,000 a year )
Which would you want to pay for?
@Todd
Um - are your numbers a bit skewed? Are you sure you want to say that .NET takes 100 times longer? Seems a bit of a false dilemma to me…
Write your app in Java - 0.5 hours at $100 an hour ($50)
Write your app in PHP - 12 years at $100 an hour ($???)
Which would *you* choose?!?!
?
$3.5 million for a hosting company, smart move.
This is a good news for all those Rails lovers and startups who work with Engine Yard folks. and this a great move towards making Rails a better enterprise candidate . Go Rails!.. I have covered the story in my post also. here is the link http://www.messagedance.com/me.....630118a41a
I think this is the wrong message to take from the announcement.
This VC investment is primarily about Ruby and surrounding infrastructure, not Rails.
Rails isn’t the ‘next Java’.. the comparison doesn’t even make sense.
Rails is merely a popular and useful Ruby library. EngineYard’s play is based on Ruby as a platform, hence their (much appreciated) support of Rubinius and Merb.
@AnonTroll
Perfect. Thank you for that analogy. I will use it later today.
@John
Ummm. I would never choose Java, .NET or PHP when RoR is available. KTHXBAI
Thank you for the many kind comments about Engine Yard!
Benchmark’s investment will allow us to move faster and stay ahead of demand for our services.
Additionally, it will allow us to focus extensively on releasing much of our internally developed technology as open source projects, and continue development of Rubinius and Merb.
The progress of Rubinius over the last month has been breathtaking. Combine that with rapid adoption of Merb for performance sensitive projects and you can see that we’re squarely focused on Ruby *and* Rails performance.
We’ve been cash constrained for 14 months, but have managed to grow Engine Yard to profitabiltiy before this investment. We took this cash to give us freedom of action and to partner with Mitch Lasky, Peter Fenton, and the rest of the smart folks at Benchmark.
We have no intention of becoming bloated. We do intend to move very quickly.
Congratulations EngineYard on getting some great investors on board. We use EngineYard for hosting at Mixbook, and they are really phenomenal. They spend hours and hours with us working on how to improve our search performance, add indexes to improve db performance, logging slow queries, and generally acting as a true outsourced deployment team. I have never experienced better hosting!
Comparing Java and Ruby is like comparing cement and twigs. One is used to build our infrastructure: sky scrapers, airports and highways; the other might be useful for a shanty hut.
PHP
Bjorn: I strongly disagree, and I think the Rails sites in existence today show your analogy to be a false one.
A better analogy might be that one (Java) is used for building things like airports and other overbuilt, massive project, while the other (Rails) is a better choice for anything smaller than a skyscraper.
Erick - has Sun made any money from Java?
@38 — Mixbook bug report –
Just visited your site to take a look. Well firstoff, slow gmail wouldn’t load it. So tried it from a new Firefox session, typed Mixbook.com. It came up, but when I clicked “Try It”, it just killed the browser session. Happened twice.
I know mosizlla firefox is a piece of CRAP. but something’s wrong with your app fyi………… Have tried shutterfly. and Flickr. Is Mixbook similar ?
Why don’t folks fix existing #@$#&*! like FF before unleashing new stuff on the world?
@Claudio (18): Sorry to say, but stating that applications run fast and scale well only when written in PHP ‘due its stateless nature’ is just plain ridiculous. As with Java and Rails, PHP is a language and Rails is a framework, so comparing Rails to PHP is comparing apples and oranges. Besides, PHP might be better than Ruby as regards raw performance, but then again that’s not the point of Rails. Rails is all about development speed, since hardware is cheap, but human work (i.e. development) is expensive.
Does anything even remotely similar exist for Django?
First off, congratulations to EY on closing this funding.
We’re also an EY customer (http://www.boxedup.com), and I’ve got to agree with what Obie, Andrew and others have said. They’re way more than just a hosting provider, essentially acting as an outsourced ops/sys admin function, which justifies the premium and means you can focus on dev and the business while they keep things running (and provide advice on the best way to do stuff to have a well performing app). As they say, ‘you write it, we run it’. And the service provided is good. All the people on the team are high quality, and in hosting with EY you know you’ve got some kick-ass domain expertise behind the service. And even if you’re not their biggest customer (yet!) you can still get their best minds helping you out on stuff (i.e. the absolute top guys). And the mark of a good service-oriented company - if there is a wobble they’re open about it, and fix it fast.
So congratulations again EY on the funding! Well deserved from a customer’s perspective.
R on R is indeed easy and fast to use, but it does not have near the capabilities and scalability of either Java or .Net.
For a quick non-industrial strength applications it serves its purpose, but only the inexperienced would use R on R for anything more.
Lots of low-end developers like it, because frankly, any dumb ass can use it with little to no analysis, programming or object oriented development skills.
We have found very productive staff in Java and .Net for less than $20 per hours overseas, so even for prototypes, why not build using something that has legs?
@James,
Any team who binds them-self to just one language and one framework is silly.
Haven’t you heard of post modern programming?
Or were you too busy chest pounding?
Check out thrift , pretty amazing contribution by the FB team. Open your eyes there is no one true way.
I’ve deploy my own Rails apps (as well as Java and PHP apps) in the past on various vendors (Rackspace, EC2, even GoDaddy), but I am now an Engine Yard customer for the same reasons that Chris Osborne mentions.
The process of hosting, managing and maintaining servers are only strategic in a small number of businesses. Unless you have the man-power or the size to worry about the bottom line, paying a premium for a full-service vendor like Engine Yard makes sense.
In the past, it would take me weeks to get a solid production environment setup with a hosting vendor. With EngineYard, it literally took me 20 minutes.