Qype*Blog

This is our first blog entry in English as the matter may interest a broader audience.

Qype is a local social network in Germany (a bit like yelp.com in the U.S. just that we use tagging as a way to network people, businesses and places of interest).

As Qype is one of the first larger (maybe the first large one?) web applications in Germany running on Ruby on Rails, a lot of people have asked me about our experience. Some people call it “a fashionable programmers language”.

Ruby on Rails has been a fantastic ride for us.
Our Ruby on Rails story began end of January 2006. We decided to switch to RoR from a more traditional Java approach, when it became clear that there will be going to be a tremendous amount of learning in our market. With little budget, we neeeded an infrastructure that would make it easy in the future to adjust to our changing perception of user’s needs. We had invested about 3 months time and had a running prototype in Java, so there was quite a risk. However, most experts advised us to go for the switch.

Our developers love to work in the Rails environment. Less code. Ruby seems to very easy to get into for those who had no experience with it.

Obviously, the test for end user services like Qype is scalability. And this worried me slightly over the past months. However, the worry has vanished, when only a week after our launch, we were featured on the homepage of spiegel.de, German’s largest news site. The rails application, which was then on only one application server, did not even blink when at the traffic attack. Ruby on Rails was a great choice for us.

Dieser Entrag ist vom Wednesday, 10. May 2006 um 10:58 und wird unter Qype eingeordnet. Du kannst alle Antworten zu diesem Beitrag unter RSS 2.0 verfolgen. Oder selbst eine Antwort verfassen.