Several months back, there was somewhat of an uproar in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities when it was revealed that after two years of effort, the CD Baby Web site was abandoning their Ruby on Rails rewrite. The CD Baby site was reimplemented in mere months after returning to the use of PHP. This past week, I have been working with another company that is in a very similar situation.
As most people involved with Web development know, Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released on December 7. There was some discussion about the release on Slashdot, where I noticed some interesting comments regarding scalability in the age of Ruby on Rails.
During the early 1990s, a number of developers had the opportunity to use a NeXT system. Of those people, some were lucky enough to get to actually develop applications for such systems. NeXT brought us what was essentially a revolution at the time. Objective-C began to truly make Smalltalk-style OO accessible and practical. Their well-architectured class libraries were a real masterpiece, especially compared to the cobbled-together utility libraries used in many existing C libraries. And their UI was, of course, superb.
Luke Plant has been working on a Haskell-based blogging application for a while now, and describing his progress. I was dismayed to read today that he’s giving up!
One of his main complaints was with regards to the poor state of the available Haskell database interfacing libraries. He does mention Takusen, which a colleague of mine has been using for a personal project of his own. But Takusen doesn’t appear useful to Luke, due to a lack of a proper MySQL backend.
Last night at the pub, a friend and colleague of mine was telling me of a recent experience he had at a company he was doing some IT work for. I think the lesson learned is a very important one, and thus I wish to share it. But first I’ll describe the situation he encountered.
At far too many companies I have witnessed the effects of homogenized enterprise-grade networks. While many claim that it’s easier to support such networks, I often find that difficult to believe. The benefit brought on by the widespread similarity is often overshadowed by the severe negative consequences when things go wrong.
Recently I read an article that talked of storing images in databases versus on the file system. In an article I wrote, I expressed an interest in seeing more data regarding the performance differences between the two methods. Well, the author of the original article has done some more testing, and written about it.
While I tend to use a relational database system like PostgreSQL or DB2, I have worked with systems set up by other people wherein they have used MySQL.
Anyone who has done any significant web development has no doubt resorted to the use of a relational database. I am no exception! And so I was very interested when today I read an article about whether images should be stored on the file system as files, or whether they should be stored within a database.