Comments on: Why Ruby on Rails?

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 01:08:26 +0000

Great series of posts here. I've still not found the thing I care about to generate widespread use, but I can relate in terms of building something that you care about, that's fun, and popular. More gratifying than any day job could ever have.

It's funny that in .NET our tools and toolbox keep getting better, and I wish we could get more ex-Java folks to come our way. We even have an MVC framework now coming for ASP.NET, which has some great potential in a lot of situations.

My girlfriend loves the site. Well done.

By: Nikolas Coukouma

Nikolas Coukouma — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 09:32:12 +0000

It's worth noting that Mongrel itself is capable of handling many connections; the problem is that Rails has a big mutex that makes Rails (effectively) only able to cope with one request at a time. One of the major motivations for Merb was to show that Rails could be done with a much smaller lock, and therefore better parallelism (although it can still only leverage one CPU, of course).

By: JustMagicMaria

JustMagicMaria — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:27:22 +0000

A huge THANK YOU, Casey, for starting this blog and especially this post! You convinced me to switch from Drupal to Ruby on Rails for my current web development project. And I'm having a blast! Keep it coming, everything you're writing is fascinating.

Maria (Who is (im-)patiently waiting for her Ravelry invite.)

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:55 +0000

Hey casey, i don’t know anything about ruby on rails, since the last time I programmed a real database was back when Netscape was the hot new browser. But I just wanted you to know that I have really been digging Ravelry (when Larissa manages to get off of it) from the point of view of data. Ravelry is such a classical kind of exposition of the relational database idea — different concepts and levels of detail, tied together by common fields. I feel like it should practically be a textbook example of how functional and flexible relational schemes can be. I also really like the way you let people pull in stuff from outside sources like Flickr and blogs, instead of trying to create a whole new environment that demands they duplicate that stuff. The user interface screens bring a lot of info together without being ugly. All in all, it’s a very nice production. Cheers! -Martin

By: Casey

Casey — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:51:38 +0000

Hi Jenn,

Nope - we didn’t do any formal usability testing. Hopefully it isn’t too obvious Jess and I use the site a lot ourselves and we are constantly noting changes and improvements that we believe would make our own user experience a little smoother or nicer. We tend to apply those changes from time to time and see how people react.

Generally things go well. Once in a while, feedback is mixed (this has happened 2 or 3 times) and we have to force changes that we believe are for the better. Sometimes people that have been using Ravelry for many months start to develop a resistance to change

I had planned on using CrazyEgg.com’s click heatmaps to gather some information from the live site but I haven’t had a chance yet. The site is still pretty unpolished in lots of places and often far from my vision, so I haven’t really tried to sit back and look at things from “all users” point of view yet..

By: jennward

jennward — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:04:13 +0000

Oops, so the question I forgot to ask in my last post is about the UI. Part of my job is manager of online user experience work (usability testing, etc.). Did you do anything formal for Ravelry or do you rely on user feedback? Any plans for formal testing/assessment of the site?

P.S. Virtualization is wickedly cool. I can't believe you've got 16GB of memory in your servers!