Patrick Lightbody is on the steering committee of the Java web-framework WebWork and not at all happy about all the attention Ruby on Rails is gaining. Apparently, it’s all terribly undeserving as Rails surely “doesn’t scale” to applications with “thousands of concurrent users and/or hundreds of thousands of gigabytes”, right?

Of course, Patrick doesn’t bother to back up his charge besides asserting that “anyone… knows that a CRUD framework just doesn’t cut it”. Interesting. Rails follows a similar approach to scaling as do Yahoo and LiveJournal. Share Nothing. Push concurrency into the database and the memcache. I hear that approach is working rather well on LJ’s 100 machine park handling 5+ million dynamic requests per day.

But why bother addressing the specifics when you can just assert the somewhat cryptic “Mapping web UI directly to the DB never scales”. What does this mean exactly? Does Patrick think that the only UI you can do in Rails is a scaffolded one? Oy, talk about forming ill-informed opinions.

If any of these vague, hand-waving assertions should have failed to convince you, then of course, we can always rely on our good friend complexity!

Form processing, payroll, etc probably work very well with RoR. But trying to implement Spoke using RoR would be impossible — the schema is just too complex.

I’m sure it’s too complex, Patrick. Can’t beat an expert at his own game. But since you’re interested in learning more about marketing your open source wares, you might start by dropping the FUD tactics. They leave such nasty stains of ignorance and bitterness.

Brian McCallister offers a similar rejection of Patrick’s fear mongering:

It is scary (FEAR FEAR) to see opinions formed, and backed with vitriol, by fear that something different than what they are doing works better. Something you don’t know that approaches the same problems as something you do know does not make the first thing bad. It does not justify lashing out at it saying “it is just [foo] and sucks so bad compared to [bar] and can never [scale|perform|manage|eat] enough to be used for [serious|difficult|real] things.” Possibly this is true, but reacting that way out of fear certainly does not make it so.

Now back to our mega-scala-enterprisy-serious-real-complex-important work. Nothing to see here, move along.