Top Sites Built with Ruby on Rails

http://blog.netguru.co/post/58995145341

by danso • 13 years ago

42 49 13 years ago

blog.netguru.co

pkaler• 13 years ago

Define Ruby on Rails. At that scale don't you have to transition your model layer from ActiveRecord to a service layer that sits on top of your databases? Certainly at that scale you are going to be using many different types of databases to store different types of data.

danso• 13 years ago

Maybe it can be defined as the core-front-end is using ActiveRecord (or a NoSQL equivalent) to do most of the DB interaction and the Rails controller and routing mechanisms?

By that standard, Twitter wouldn't count (and it isn't on this list), just as Twitter shouldn't be on a Top 10 Drupal sites list since only the dev docs are in Drupal.

kaonashi• 13 years ago

gem 'rails'

mikkelewis• 13 years ago

@Scribd we built https://github.com/kovyrin/db-charmer to manage multiple model connections to separate servers/databases.

richardjordan• 13 years ago

Rails != ActiveRecord

This isn't rocket science. You start your project rails new foo. You include gem 'rails' in your Gemfile. You're a rails application. How you architect for growth is beside the point.

chuckd1356• 13 years ago

Seems like that article missed A LOT of sites running on RoR.

rhizome• 13 years ago

The domain name should have told us that.

od2m• 13 years ago

IIRC, Hulu is RoR.

alasdair_• 13 years ago

Groupon runs RoR and has many tens of millions of users.

marknutter2• 13 years ago

I thought Twitter was always the canonical example for a large Ruby on Rails app. Although these days it's splintered into a very large variety of different technologies, I believe Rails is still in the mix somewhere.

octo_t• 13 years ago

Nope, their entire stack is JVM based now.

magicarp• 13 years ago

That wouldn't exclude JRuby though

jasdeepsingh• 13 years ago

Not entire stack, they are still using some parts of the original monorail app in their stack.

This was true as of July 2013. Source: A Twitter Engineer working on the Tweets Service inside their mothership SoA Application.

gkoberger• 13 years ago

I believe the front-facing Twitter.com is all Scala, but a lot of their internal and smaller sites are RoR.

Dirlewanger• 13 years ago

Thought it was the other way around: RoR still exists in the UI but they transitioned to Scala due to all the outages they had 3-5 years ago.

argonaut2• 13 years ago

I spoke to an engineering manager at Twitter a few months ago. While he did not definitively say that "all" front-facing code is in Scala, when I asked him where does Twitter still use Ruby on Rails, he said something along the lines of "We still use Ruby on Rails for internal tools," which would imply that the main Twitter app is mostly/all Scala.

illyism• 13 years ago

Would the backend operations be part of that? Stuff like indexing, caching, database maintenance, etc

callmeed• 13 years ago

I thought Gilt Group (Gilt, Jetsetter) and Living Social were both pretty Rails-heavy.

Also, Shopify should be considered since they power tons of stores on separate sites.

egonschiele• 13 years ago

Sorry, this list doesn't sound correct at all. "Sites built with Ruby on Rails": maybe. "Top sites": nope.

Lifebot• 13 years ago

From the article:

Out of curiosity (and for fun!) we’ve recently used Alexa - a web traffic reporting platform - to discover the top ten sites built using Ruby on Rails framework.

It clearly defines "top sites" as those listed from Alexa. In which case, it is correct.

shivpuri• 13 years ago

In that case, Flipkart should also be there.

kanwisher• 13 years ago

Bloomberg.com

mikeevans• 13 years ago

LivingSocial? Groupon? Shopify?

jgautsch• 13 years ago

I had a sales meeting with a large IT company a week ago and they said that if we licensed them our product, they would want to do a re-write in Java if the product (currently Rails based) proved to be effective. My app is for physician use, so there could only theoretically be _at most_ less than 1000000 users, so "at scale" wouldn't be so huge, relatively. Any ideas as to why this company was thinking this way?

wasd3• 13 years ago

Misunderstanding about the performance bottle necks of RoR and desire to prematurely optimize.

canadiancreed• 13 years ago

Possible interfacing with ancient legacy datasources? Only one I could think of. Well that and the head honchos hadn't followed tech since the digital storage mediums for medical data was Access and Excel, and Java was considered "new".

TheBiv• 13 years ago

Simple. Maybe they were a JAVA-shop?

ams6110• 13 years ago

Yep. Java=serious enterprise software, and they've got all their IT organization built on IBM servers running J2EE Enterprise Java Bean containers and they actually understand it, or at least think they do. Rails=toy hacker stuff, and scary because they don't know what it is.

netcraft2• 13 years ago

we are considering groovy and grails for this sort of reason. I work with lots of enterprise clients who won't consider anything on premises thats not .net or java.

vorg4• 13 years ago

They won't run Linux-based software but they'll buy into a programming language called "Groovy"! ... LOL ...

anko• 13 years ago

why not jruby and rails? rails has a lot more of a community, and you'd still get to run it on java.

wasd3• 13 years ago

I use groovy and grails at work and the only similarity of grails and rails is name.

dsheth• 13 years ago

Considering the type of information that would be stored in an application for use by physicians, they might be considering Java due to the number of security issues found in Rails as compared to the number of security issues found in something like Spring over the past several years.

voodooChile• 13 years ago

Why don't they consider something like JRuby? It's proven, and allows Ruby to run in the JVM, given Java 7's improved support for dynamic runtime.

gary4gar• 13 years ago

Instead of full rewrite, migrate to JRuby. From sysadmin standpoint, an rails app running on JRuby is java. so you can submit .WAR file to them & they can deploy it like a normal java app running on the JVM.

spoiler• 13 years ago

I think it's worth noting that sky.fm is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so I am guess they are running Rails too, or are planning to switch to it!

abimaelmartell• 13 years ago

rails app -> https://translate.twitter.com/home

garazy• 13 years ago

Nice list but if you include off-homepage usage by the top sites then you get massive companies like

Amazon studios.amazon.com

Twitter support.twitter.com

Weather feedback.weather.com

Go sportsnation.espn.go.com

AT&T insider.att.com

Target weeklyad.target.com

Imgur store.imgur.com

Photobucket support.photobucket.com

Shameless plug - all found at http://builtwith.com

Axsuul• 13 years ago

Don't forget basecamp.com, the guys who started it all

Top Sites Built with Ruby on Rails

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