Monday, July 28, 2008

Scale Fail

REST on the back-end is the most brain sodomizing idea that I've ever heard of in my life. Of *course* you should never, ever have your back-end servers polling each other.
Is XMPP better? Yes. Is MOM better? Yes. Is this news? No. So why is this idea the toast of the blagofail?

More importantly, am I the only one who knows that "Web Architecture" is a technological Hindenburg, and Web Architects are the biggest joke since Yakov Smirnoff?



NEW PLAN. Write a thing, and then bolt a web page onto it. If your thing doesn't suck, your web page won't suck. It's actually a two step process:

  1. Write application
  2. Web page

If you fuck it up and start with step 2, your shit won't scale. You will fall over at 10 users. Your 10 users will fall over on you. It will be a massive domino clusterfuck, all because your dumb ass though architecture meant HTML+relational database. Actually, it won't be massive, because you couldn't scale past 10 users.

I judge people with a simple formula:
Smart - Rails*PHP

Or in other words, if your resume has the word "Distributed" you get 20 points. If it has the word "Web", you lose 3000 points. If you tell me that Rails is scalable, I pour sugar in your gas tank.

Sometimes applications need to move data around in real time. Thats what messaging systems are for, and HTTP isn't.

tl;dr
Good Architecture > Hitler > Web Architecture