MagLev is Gemstone/S for Ruby, Huge News

...and I suspect it will be a hugely disruptive force in the Ruby/Rails community in the future.

Holy shit! - Antonio Cangiano (after seeing the benchmarks run)

Avi Bryant seems to be leading the project and it's only 100 days old (and how did it stay secret so long?!?) However, since it's based on the mature Fast VM used by Gemstone/S, they're already blowing away Ruby MRI 1.8 benchmarks with 8-60x speed increases. Mention was made of cooperating closely with Rubinius team to make sure that their implementation runs all the Ruby specs, and is truly Ruby and not a fork.

When MagLev is widely available, it basically means that there will be a truly enterprise-class option for writing trading systems, logistics and other large persistent object-heavy systems in Ruby. The shared memory cache (basically a large OODB) holds up to 17PB and has transactional capabilities and automatic synchronization. According to Avi, there is a strong commitment to making sure there are good ways to use Rails on MagLev -- ActiveRecord, which no longer would be truly needed, could still be used (with the exception of find_by_sql, of course).

I'm dying to play with this stuff. Ditching relational databases is a no-brainer for most of the projects that I've worked on in the last 5 years.

Comments

[ggoodale]

Agreed. The potential to reduce system complexity and interaction between the traditional app 'tiers' is tremendous. If Avi and his team can really deliver on a solution whose scalability story for is 'just add another MagLev instance', we'll see the effects rippling throughout our industry.

[Jacek Becela]

Recently I was waiting for some breakthru news in "Ruby subculture" (dreaming of something like Rails) and now - here it s. Can't wait to see it.

[Paul Barry]

It hasn't been a secret for a month:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/maglev-gemstone-builds-ruby

Although details have been scarce. Can't way to see it. What's the licensing model?

[Dan Croak]

MagLev is the one thing I want tons of reporting on from RailsConf. Rubinius is cool, but this is the one I've been waiting for. So excited. Been itching to ditch ORMs/MySQL in favor of a really great object persistence model of some kind. 17PB? Good God!

[Brian]

MagLev's demo was certainly cool, even if it did contain a fair amount of sleight of hand (shaking ones sleeves notwithstanding). What confuses me a bit is why wait for MagLev. OODBs are not a new idea. How often do you need 17pb of data? And do you really think a closed-source, single-vendor monolithic VM + OODB persistence is a sustainable *and* growth oriented technology?

To me, the illusionist analogy goes deeper than feigned pulling a rabbit from a hat.

[Mark]

I wish you talk hadn't been at the same time as the mod_rails talk. It would have been nice to get your point of view comparing Gemstone and mod_rails, especially since mo_rails now supports rack & wsgi (and by proxy django). They also boasted huge speed (2x) improvements over nginx + mongrel (when using their patched GC version of MRI).

[Vladimir Sizikov]

I'd like to note that RubySpec is not purely by "Rubinius Team". We have lots of contributions from all over the place, including regular ones from JRuby team, now by many Google Summer of Code students, from some MRI folks, etc. Actually, there is a nice friendly community around the RubySpec now (most of us hang out at #rubyspec IRC on Freenode).

RubySpec is now a stand-alone project, with its own repository, site, bug tracking, etc:
http://rubyspec.org/

[andy]

sorry to be a newb here,

but is there a site detailing what MagLev is?

I get that it's an OODB but beyond that I'm not finding much via google.

Any particular reason RDB's are frowned upon? I did a Plone app with Zope's OODB and it was a interesting experience - but I didn't end up thinking OODB's are in anyway superior to RDB's. I just though some use cases lend themselves to an OODB whereas others work better with RDB.

For one thing I found learning to do search queries with OODB a bit of a brain tease at first - mostly because I had years of SQL to de-program from my thinking.

[bryon]

I am developing in Gemstone/S. The key issue is Gemstone/S is an OODB, application server, and web server all built into one.

There is no reads or writes. The objects on the disk space are part conceptually part of the image. The only database commands are beginTransaction, abortTransaction, commitTransaction.

This is radically different from other OODBs where one still has to read/write the objects. It really does a lot for you. Plus their reduced conflict collection classes are a huge help.