According to Techcrunch, Twitter will be moving away from Ruby on Rails after 2 years of scalibility issues. This is a blow for the ROR framework since it confirms what the naysayers have been saying about it, which is that it's not an enterprise framework and is in essence a series of patches that has made application development easy but resulting in unreliable and unscalable applications. Late last year the core developer of Mongrel, the ROR web server also trashed ROR.

I've been developing using ROR since early last year and haven't done anything close to Twitter so I don't have any experience with scaling ROR, my experience has been mainly with deployment where it can be quite a headache to get ROR setup and running smoothly.

If twitter with its cash and endless pool of talent cannot be able to scale ROR to its desired effect then what does that mean for us who are delving into ROR and betting our zero budget apps on it? I think it means as developers we need to assess and reassess our plans before committing ourselves to a framework that seems to be receiving more bad news by the day.   

Despite its negative publicity some large scale applications such as Yellowpages.com have opted to move from Java to ROR which is a plus for the ROR framework and community (Incidentally I headed over to Yellowpages.com and noticed that when I clicked on city links none of them loaded, may be a connection issue). One upside of all this negative sentiment is that someone will write a better and more reliable Ruby based framework like Camping, Merb so its not all bad.