Ionrock Dot Org

It has been somewhat interesting to see how the Rails community has handled the recent hubbub regarding scaling. I think Tim had the best perspective I have read, but I haven't read everything of course. The point I took from Tim was that Rails is fast enough for a lot of applications, which I agree with and had I found a job working with Ruby instead of of Python I would have been perfectly happy writing Rails applications.

In the world of Python and WSGI I think scaling might be slightly easier because there are so many great libraries and patterns to follow. In a way this doesn't seem pythonic because there should really only be one way to do something, but from an architectural standpoint I would imagine allowing many options using explicit configuration still falls under the pythonic category. The downside is that you don't get the same quick start you get with Rails. I am not saying you can't achieve the same productivity with Python because you can. The difference is that you do not automatically have a single framework that helps you make basic database backed web applications like Rails provides. Again, I am not saying that TurboGears, Pylons, Django, etc. are not just as good as Rails, but rather they are all different and help to create different types of sites.

Generally I think Python libraries allow a slightly more difficult start up time but result in a more customized and eventually scalable architecture. The sacrifice is that the initial development time could be a bit slower. Like everything in life, it is all a game finding the right balance between form and function.

The past few weeks have proven to be pretty busy in the world of Bright Content. I created half of an Atom Publishing Protocol client, changed trunk to support 90% of APP at one base URL and set up this site to work from trunk. I also moved the vast majority of the basic APP implementation to use XSLT instead of Python for validating and taking ownership over entries. It proved to be a great exercise and what's more it works really well. There is still a bunch to do but with the URLs getting more solidified and a few other design decisions having been made, I am excited to move forward towards a possible release. In the mean time if anyone would like to help with development feel free to stop by #brightcontent on freenode if you are interested or have questions.