I am starting a new web site project involving very technical report
and configuration pages and I am looking for advise on what language
to use. This project is a rewrite of a web site currently written in C
and XML.
The two technologies I am looking at are Ruby on Rails and Java,
though I am open to others.
My main concern with scripting languages like Ruby is performance...
Performance of programmers, or the program? :-)
Having been through these arguments several times over a number of
years, I urge you to carefully consider the cost of not meeting the
specification properly, or of not delivering at all.
I used to do Smalltalk consulting. People routinely bad-mouthed us on
the performance issue. But I actually got to work on a project that
had a complementary component of similar magnitude. Three experience
Smalltalkers and three novices got our part done in eight months. The
other team had 20 C++ programmers, and last I heard, they were not
done three years later.
Once you come up to speed in Ruby, you will be able to fly through
multiple implementation scenarios. Then when you get everything the
way you want it, if it isn't fast enough, re-code it in Java. That's
using Ruby as a prototyping language, but you might just find it *is*
fast enough, or can be tuned to be fast enough, without switching
languages.
... it seems
to me that this would limit the performance of number crunching.
I've heard that over and over. Don't worry about it until you need to.
"Pre-optimization" kills more projects than poor performance. Most
reasonable scripting languages (including Ruby) feature just-in-time
compilation. This tends to work best on small code segments -- like
number crunching. I've found that the difference between Smalltalk and
C++ can be as little as 10% penalty -- which is nothing, compared to
the 10,000% penalty of development time!
Our web pages will only have to deal with very small numbers of
simultaneous users, 1 or 2 most of the time...
Another reason to defer performance concerns.
Remember, if you ain't doing incremental development, you're gonna get
excremental results. :-)
:::: On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament],
'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will
the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the
kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. --
Charles Babbage
:::: Jan Steinman <http://www.Bytesmiths.com/Item/99AT12>
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