Ruby on Rails: Scalability? Security?

Ruby on Rails may be flavour of the year, but is it secure? Will it scale?

Security vulnerabilities are logic errors. You can have just as many security violations in a Java program or a Perl program or something else.

So would he recommend Rails for a highly secure application like online banking?

Definitely. But what gets used is not necessarily decided on technical excellence but more: ‘I wouldn’t get fired for using Java.’ It’s a political concern more than it’s a technical concern. As for scalability, we didn't try to solve that problem with Rails, because it is already solved. How is Yahoo scaling? They’re doing billions of page views a day, and they’re using PHP. The thing about PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby is that they can all be architected in the same manner, which is this notion of not having session state in the application layer. You push that down to the database, or you push it down to a shared memory store. That gives you the freedom of adding new application servers at will. You have load balancers, then you have web servers, then you have load balancers, then you have application servers. Rails is intensely scalable in that fashion.

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