Scott Yang's Playground

Jeff Atwood commented on the Twitter scalability problem and blamed on Ruby’s slowness. I have quoted from Coding Horror a few times (in my other blogs as well), but I still do not get how his opinions can be so highly regarded in programming community, when he cannot even distinguish between performance and scalability. Even [...]

DHH responded to Twitter’s scalability issue. Again that pin-points the “pain” of many share-nothing framework — database, and the lack of generic framework support to facilitate scaling out the database (yeah, I know it sounds oxymoron).

Joyent introduced Slingshot that provides offline support to Rails applications. Lack of off-line support has always been the Achilles’ heel of SaaS-based applications that serve through HTTP — at least it is one of the most frequently asked features at work! Slingshot provides (1) a container environment for running Rails applications on Windows and [...]

A few humourous programming language stories — Raganwald: Programming Language Stories — where it looks at the attitude of C, Ruby on Rails, Java and Scheme programmers. The RoR one is my favourite as it was a derivative from another popular joke. Just inside the gates of heaven, St. Peter sits at a desk checking people [...]

Alrond’s technoblog: The performance test of 6 leading frameworks. Very interesting read, as Alrond tested Django (Python), TurbGears (Python), Ruby on Rails 1.1.6/1.2.1 (Ruby), Catalyst (Perl), Code Igniter (PHP) and Symfony (PHP), using various load and memory testing utilities. His conclusion? Django is fast, and can be very light on memory as well. RoR 1.1.6 is significantly [...]

Ohloh: PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast. A clearly link bait title, as it is in fact analysing by the “language”, i.e. PHP vs. Ruby, instead of frameworks. However, the analysis is interesting. As well as Brad Feld’s feedback on this article. Some of my thoughts: I won’t say it represents the “big picture”. Ohloh is only indexing [...]

Alessandro Vernet: Ruby is on its way of fixing unicode issues, and he concluded that lacking of proper unicode support in Ruby might be caused initially designed by Matz who is a Japanese, who have been relunctant to support Han unification in charset and migrate to Unicode. I am not sure whether it is really [...]

James Gosling in Java Is Under No Serious Threat From PHP, Ruby or C#: “PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,” he [Gosling] continued, “but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have [...]