Cal Henderson’s Building Scalable Web Sites is a must read for anyone in the business of developing for the web.

The author is a PHP hacker and it was interesting to see that according to him, PHP has had it’s fair share of the same question people keep asking about Rails: “Does it scale?”

The distinction between performance and scalability is made very clearly in the book and a scalable system is defined as one that has thee characteristics:

• It can accommodate increased usage.
• It can accommodate an increased dataset.
• It is maintainable.

Rails passes all these tests for the same reasons PHP does. An increased dataset is accommodated in the database layer, an increased user-base is accommodated though the “share nothing” architecture and as for maintainability, Rails passes with flying colours.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Books, Ruby or Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.