Great post.

I enjoy writing Java more than writing Ruby. So consider me dangerous!

“@brandon no one codes in java because they want to.”

I do!

Peace
-stephan

Ruby is an extremely beautiful language, tons of users, awesome community, with a bunch of love from Sun (ala JRuby, etc).

Yeah, there are a lot of fan boys in every language… and you could say especially people coming from… say… PHP to Rails, many of those who don’t know anything about OOP, and still rave about how awesome it is without knowing anything about it.

Alas… many come from Java to Ruby, for good reasons. So, don’t be such a prick.

Besides I’m not talking about Java vs. Ruby. I’m talking about Grails vs. Ruby on Rails. Groovy != Java.

As far as I can tell, Grails is more beautiful and elegant than RoR.

It is amusing to see Ruby fanbois on the attack though. I’ll admit I’ve never seen that before.

I was just curious how you found Slicehost to work in this situation and if Slicehost had a different solution that they weren’t announcing publicly for situations like yours.

I have personally steered away from the round robin DNS approach in the past. If one of your frontline servers is down, it can take a little time to propagate DNS updates to remove the server from the round-robin. Some DNS servers will cache the old IP for a period of time, thereby preventing access to your app until their cache is flushed or until the slice is operational once again. RR DNS is not the best solution, but the best one with Slicehost and it gets the job done in a pinch. A reverse proxy would be optimal to prevent this as you mentioned.

NAT is the one feature I’d love to see Slicehost add, as it would allow larger customers to add new slices behind their single public IP without depending upon a single slice to do the reverse proxy work or stale DNS situations when using RR DNS. I noticed that Amazon EC2 now has this, though I haven’t investigated it fully.

PJ, Chris: To be fair, Grails is in the Groovy language, not Java. I rather liked Groovy the last time I used it; the biggest issue was that the compiler was hideously slow, though I’m sure it’s faster now. Probably F#/.NET is the most advanced dynamic language platform anyway :)

Congrats on the recent success! Being a Rails developer and Slicehost customer myself, I’m curious about more of the details of scaling with Slicehost.

While I love their service, not having a virtual public IP seems to force you into using round-robin DNS between slices, correct? Or, did you do something different to allow for more than one slice to service your web tier?

Ruby is getting faster, and there are many Ruby project underway to do away with the single thread per connection problem that Rails and ActiveRecord introduce. That is one of the reasons we use Merb instead of Rails. As soon as Datamapper is in a more stable state, we can support multiple threads running off a single instance. Until than, I’ll fire up a few more instances of my application so that I can actually enjoy the language I use everyday.

I want to be clear that I have no problem with Rails itself. Grails is “Groovy on Rails” and it is basically using Groovy (a JVM-based dynamic language) to do all the cool stuff that Rails brought to the table.

My problem with RoR *specifically* is that it uses one Thread per connection (as I understand it) which can quickly kill a server, whereas Grails is able to run in any standard Java App Server (like Jetty or Tomcat) and therefore instantly gains all the performance benefits of that.

If people are anti-RoR/Grails in general then I think they’re probably just oldschool and would be the same type who claim “Java is too slow, we need to use C++” etc.