Hi,
I'm planning to build a website that will be a simple CMS where users submit and view postings with videos, photos and text.
One decision I want to make is choosing between Ruby Enterprise Edition and Ruby 1.9.
Think I care about in order: 1- Performance & Scalability 2- Compatibility with existing gems/plugins/open source projects 3- Speed of development and deployment(I will be deploying on a VPS)
What is your suggestion?
Thanks,
Tam
Ruby 1.9 is faster. REE should generally use less RAM. REE is more compatible by far (since it's just Ruby 1.8.6).
REE from my experience has a tendency to throw mallocs in odd places (Jan 2009 tab completion in script/console - https://webrat.lighthouseapp.com/projects/10503/tickets/89-excessive-output-caused-by-and-only-by-running-webrat).
Ruby 1.9.1 has a massive bug in tempfile which blows up Rack (August 2009 present in patchlevel 243 - http://groups.google.com/group/rack-devel/browse_thread/thread/a2aab3a4720f34c4?pli=1). As well as this I do not believe Ruby 1.9.1 to have been tested properly with Rails 2.3.4 (String exclusive or - https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/tickets/3144-undefined-method-for-string-ror-234).
Quite honestly, it depends on how well you react to surprises. I use an old patchlevel of 1.9.1 on a server running 2.3.3 and other than a patch in Net::HTTP to work with ActiveResource, it runs blazingly fast.
If you don't like surprises, stick to 1.8.7.
Update 10/10/2010
The answer to my question is invalid nowadays, both Ruby EE and 1.9.2 are very good implementations of Ruby!
I'm not quite sure which one I would pick, probably 1.9.2 - or hold out to say what the phusion guys are working on, since they are working on a 1.9 version of REE - but, their 1.8.7 REE is pretty solid.