Rails For All

PitchWire chose Ruby on Rails over Java and the other web frameworks available. Find out what led to this choice, and the resulting benefits. Questions are from Robert Dempsey of Rails For All.

PitchWire is an online community for influencers (journalists, bloggers and analysts) and publicists that promotes responsible pitching and transparency. The results are more successful “hits” and a better relationship between influencers and publicists.

Before choosing Ruby on Rails, what other programming languages and web frameworks did PitchWire consider?

Java using either one of the myriad of frameworks or GWT.

What were the main considerations when deciding upon the platform for PitchWire? What were you looking for?

The main driver was that I had already written a production rails app and was comfortable with the framework and productive.

What benefits do you get from using Ruby on Rails?

Speed of development and flexibility.

Are you using any other programming languages or web frameworks for your site?

Not at the moment.

How long has the site been up, and what kind of traffic are you handling?

PitchWire has been up just over a month and our traffic is increasing.

Business are concerned about the scalability of Rails. How is PitchWire addressing those concerns?

I’m using a VPS hosting solution where I can order more VPS instances and cluster them fairly “easily” I’m told. Or failing that we will move to Joyent or EngineYard once the time is right.

Are there any important questions that I didn’t ask?

What concerns or problems have you run into with rails? I’m in the process of upgrading from 1.1.6 and there was an undocumented behavior change in AR that broke my app. It was deemed a bug but in reality it is not. The lack of a spec is a bit of a problem.