On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Kevin Weller <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey BDRG-ers! > > I have a request by a potential client for an unusual web application > architecture, and wanted to see if anyone else out there has any ideas or > knows of any Rails patches or non-Rails MVC webapp frameworks that might fit > the bill. > > Basically, what they want to do is run the entire application within the > Postgres database engine...data, business logic, page rendering, everything. > What that suggests to me on first blush is either lots of PL/Ruby (and a > newly invented internal logical architecture and framework to structure it), > or patching Rails to pull all its view elements from the database like some > Content Management System on steroids.
My intuition tells me this will fail for all the reasons Bothari pointed out in his reply. It sounds like it will be fragile and unmaintainable by the time it ever does anything useful. I'm not against storing code or logic in the DB but I think you'll find it difficult to respond to change over time. > > Of course, I will probably be pushing back on this architectural requirement > for phase 1, just so we can get something working quickly and with minimal > expense. This is a wise decision. :) > So far, security is the only reason given for the database-centric > architecture, but we've secured some pretty sensitive systems using more > traditional web application architectures before. Also, this architecture > would affect our ability to cluster the application across arrays of cheap > servers too...we'd be improvising so much that's a given in Rails. I'm not > so sure that the benefit would be worth the time and expense over a properly > tiered standard webapp. Go standard, you'll be able to find more people and take advantage of other people's work. This way you can focus on the core domain of the problem and solve the important stuff while standing on the shoulders of giants for all the other stuff you'll end up reimplementing. > > Anybody else have any thoughts or references? > > - Kevin > _______________________________________________ -- Corey Donohoe http://atmos.org http://engineyard.com http://thetownhall.org _______________________________________________ Bdrg-members mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/bdrg-members
