Mark VanOrman wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
>  I'm about to embark on a large scale project. It's basically a
> rewrite of a
> current application that processes e-commerce transactions. (sending cc
> info to bank platforms, creating records in db, handling reporting and the
> like. Average load is about 50,000 transactions/day). The current
> application is written in PHP as a cgi script. Mod_php is installed on
> apache for speed. The main reason for the rewrite is the code clutter and
> really bad design.
>
>  I'm supposed to write the application in JAVA, but willing to give Ruby a
> chance, because of nicer syntax and other neat features. My main concerns
> are
>
> 1- can Ruby handle such a mission critical applications as far as
> reliability and speed?
>
> 2- Are there any benchmarks out there that compare PHP to Ruby?
>
> 3- From your experiance, would you think it's better to develop an
> application like this as a cgi(people would post transes to
> apache) or as a
> standalone server(post directly to ruby)?

If you use Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/), you can prototype the
critical pieces of your application *very* quickly. This would allow you to
measure the performance directly and quickly determine whether or not your
critical issues are going to be a problem. Its better to know than to guess
(especially when you can do so with very little investment of time).

Rails can be used on apache with CGI, FastCGI, or mod_ruby. So you have lots
of flexibility here.

Curt