People always seem to be discussing which language/framework is best, why one is better than the other. I generally don’t like to join in on such discussions as I believe you can achieve what you want using any language. However, recently I’ve found that I’ve sort of fallen victim to such discussions.
When I was looking at the different web techs I would like to look into, I had no idea where to start. After a little while, I decided on looking at a small selection of the popular frameworks. Well, which one do I start with? I did a little reading on everyone on my list and came across a lot of comments about Ruby on Rails along the lines of “It scales terribly, they all fall apart when it gets big “. Yikes, scaling issues when the application gets a lot of users? I definitely don’t want to look at Rails first, I’d have to address all of the problems. This is why I chose Django as the first web development framework to look at.
Well, taking a step back, it seems a little silly of me to have jumped to conclusions like that. Researching a little into this matter, it seems that people who made the comment of Rails not scaling etc, probably had no idea what actual issue was with these big sites. A good example of this is the commonly quoted Twitter issue. Alex Payne clarified what the problem was in his post back in May. Even with his post, people like us who are not actually doing any web development at Twitter have no idea what the precise problem is.
So, if you’re comparing new technologies, it is probably a good idea to fully look into them before deciding if an issue really is an issue with the technology.
