You might want to read this how this Bumer Sticker, a Linked-In application, that is
serving 1 billion page views per month.
From the article...
"Ruby on Rails is frequently criticized for lacking the ability to scale. While the road to a billion page views per month has certainly had some potholes, Bumper Sticker has clearly demonstrated that the Rails platform can scale quite well, so as long as the team behind it understands that many of the bottlenecks are exactly those faced by developers on any other database-driven web platform."
Joyent also
blogged about this.
How many Rails application have you developed, then found scaling the app was fast, relatively simple... not to mention cheap?
How many Java web applications have you developed, then found scaling the app was difficult, slower, and expensive? You probably aren't even aware of the extra work you're going through here if you've never tried to scale a Rails app.
You can take your pick of frameworks, I'm not citing any specific Java web application frameworks here. I'm not directly comparing Rails to Java, but Rails to
insert-your-java-framework-here.
I've been working with Java for a long time, and it still has it's place. But I think Rails is eating Java's lunch in a lot of areas these days, particularly in the web application and web services area.
