There’s an article in the latest eWeek magazine, entitled “Scaling Ruby on Rails”, that’s instructive for those of us in the ColdFusion community. RoR is going through that time-honored rite of passage experienced by any programming language that gains wide adoption. Namely, so-called critics are questioning its scalability and its suitability for mission-critical applications. Sound familiar?

One supporter of Rails notes the following:

“The critiques we hear about Rails is it’s not scalable, that it’s not well-suited for mission-critical applications. I think those critiques are similar in nature to what we heard about Java in the mid-90s.”

And my favorite retort to the scalability questions comes from Rails creator David Heinemeier:

“This is the known as the ‘last stance’ defense. When you have nothing left of substance to argue with, you draw the ‘but does it scale?’ card.”

Awesome. Amen, my brother. I couldn’t have said it better myself. And the exact same response applies to ColdFusion, just as it did to Java and many others over the years. Once you’ve tuned a few hundred queries in your career from 3000ms to 30ms, you come to know that the scalability question is almost always a red herring. To paraphrase a quip from politics, “It’s the code, stupid!”

Our co-founder and former CTO, Mike Brunt, tells a great story about when he was onsite doing some of our famed tuning work some years ago. He had been applying our tuning efforts on a system well into the night during an engagement, and around 6am the next morning, when user traffic ramped up dramatically every day, he got a frantic call from the CEO, breathlessly saying that the servers were all down. And why did he think this? Because the traffic monitoring graphs had all dropped to sub-1-second response times, such that they looked so different than “normal” that that he concluded there must not be any traffic on the servers. In true British form, Mike said something along the lines of “Bollox to you and your bad code–the servers are fine!” Again, “It’s the code, stupid!”

So, to all ColdFusion compatriots–don’t fall for this nonsense. Ever. If you hear it, smile. It’s just a reflection of the prominence of your platform. And if you’re stuck on performance problems, contact us–we’ve never NOT tuned a system we’ve been engaged to tune.

To our brethren in the Rails community–welcome to the party. Come on in, the water’s warm. Now that you’re hearing all the same “last stance” questions that ColdFusion has been dispatching for years, we wish you all the growth that ColdFusion has experienced!