Performance Comparison For Rails and Merb
September 2, 2007
Merb is another MVC framework written in Ruby by Ezra Zygmuntowicz. Phil Misiowiec did some peformance comparsion for Rails and Merb when deploying with Mongrel, Swiftify and Nginx. You could look at full article at http://www.webficient.com/2007/08/testing-various-configurations-of-rails.html
For making it visually interesting, I created a simple Flex Chart based on those results. I kind of interpolated the same data in 2 different perspectives:
Chart 1 : Comparing Various Deployments for Rail & Merb
Chart 2 : Comparing Rails & Merb for Various Deployments
You could clearly see that Merb perfomed better than Rails but it is more evident when used with Evented Mongrel and less with simple Mongrel deployment. Also it showing storing sessions in MemCache is better than ActiveRecord store.
**** Note that I am not responsible for these results and full credit should go to Phil Misiowiec and I just try to represent the data visually here (while trying to play with Flex Charting) ******
Flex & Ruby on Rails
August 23, 2007
Recently I been looking into Adobe Flex and AIR and found promising. Flex been in market for couple of years and recently opensourced by Adobe (SDK is Free but FlexBuilder is NOT. But you could build Flex apps in any editor and compile with SDK). Flex Applications are run inside browser in Flash Player where as AIR makes applications build with flex run as desktop applications.
The good thing about Flash or Flex application is it looks and run identically in all browsers and environments where as similar thing is hard to achieve with pure DHTML or Ajax. Microsoft is also developing a similar product named “SilverLight” a browser plugin similar to Flash to run RIAs.
While all these are nice enhancement to Front-end, your backend still remains same. Flex/AIR/SilveLight can talk with Java, .NET or PHP backend services and present the data in more exciting way. Same as the case for Ruby on Rails.
In fact Rails makes serving your models as XML lot easier with ‘to_xml’ method and flexible functions like ‘respond_to?’ to sniff whether client wants HTML or XML. So it shouldnt be any harder to mix some flex in your app.
These are some resources to get your feet wet:
