[Startup] Java Backend and Rails Frontend

Question

I have a startup considering building a Java backend and a Rails frontend. The Java backend will take care of creating a caching layer for the database and offer other additional services. The Rails frontend will mostly be for creating the webapp and monitoring tools.

What startups/companies out there are using this kind of setup? What are some gotchas in terms of development speed, deployment, scalability, and integration?

(What would be helpful for me is personal experience or informal case studies. I'd like to de-priorities answers addressing alternatives like Grails or JRuby unless it turns out to be a big part of the equation)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious here, but the biggest gotcha here is the actual fact you're combining two technologies. Not only will development be slower - Rails and all Java frameworks are expecting to have a full Ruby/Java application - but for the other issues you mention (deployment, scalability, integration), the existing tools and solutions will not work, or at least not very well.

If you have a compelling reason to combine the two, go ahead but expect to spend more time on these issues than with a single technology solution. If you don't, pick either Rails or Java.

Answer 2

I have used similar pair for one of my projects, but instead of RoR I used Python. I don't think there's large difference.

In general, there's nothing specific in this kind of programming. Two most important things you must care about:

• good modularity;
• well thought-out protocol between RoR and Java.

First is about exact functionality decomposition between parts of the system. We've got some troubles because of not understanding what part of a job must be done by Java, and what part by Python. In general, you must tie together all functions that are close to each other, and thing that are far must be connected in a very few places. I guess you know rules of good modularity, but in case of composing different languages this must be thought-out much more carefully. You can also be interested in creating several distinct Java services (e.g. one for database caching and another one for all the rest) to be able freely combine them or even use in other projects later.

Second is about communication between your parts. I can see two ways to communicate: through database and through pure network protocol. The former need some network communication anyway, so we used pure network protocol, without any other way to connect parts.
We had experimented a lot with SOAP, but it gave hundreds of errors: this protocol is quite ok to connect services written in one language (i.d. Java to Java), but terrible for connecting services in different languages - automatic tools for generating WSDLs gave different results for Java and Python, and manual creating of scheme was hard and labor-intensive.
So we used to REST. It uses all the features of HTTP protocol such as all four main HTTP methods (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE), error codes and many other things, so it covers almost everything you may want. The only restriction with REST is that it can't hold state, so you may need to implement your own sessions mechanism.
If you're not very comfortable with REST and seek some real example, see Facebook Graph API and for implementing REST services in Java you can use Restlets.

Answer 3

I would strongly urge you to consider having the frontend and backend in the same JVM for performance reasons.

For Rails, JRuby can run Rails, and you can have it in a Java EE container providing fast communication between components.

Having multiple architechtures which do not run in the same process requires you to do network based communication which takes much, much longer than just passing a reference to an object (I do not expect you to want to use shared memory).

Answer 4

I've never done any rails development but here are my thoughts. Why not just use Grails? I've done a fair amount of Grails development and it works well for rapid prototyping. It also offers all the power of Java, Spring, and Hibernate. Instead of dealing with communication between two different technologies you could take advantage of the fact that Grails uses Spring and Hibernate under the covers to deal with cashing as well as any other requirements these technologies support. If you have Java developers Grails should not be to hard to pick up. The grails plugin story is decent. All of them are stored in a central place and are easy to obtain but quality differs depending on the plugin author. You also have to remember that since Grails uses Groovy which is syntactically similar to Java and runs on the JVM it is very easy to use existing java code including the multitude of available Java libraries. I don't know this for certain but I assume there are a lot more libraries out there for use with Java and there for with Grails then are available for the Ruby language and Rails. I can't make a resource usage call for you but my question would be how many people do you have with experience designing Rails systems that use Java on the back end with all the gotchas that will go along with that? You may find that you have no one who is proficient at debugging when something goes wrong in communication between the two technologies.