Good point, though I'd also add that the OS and the frameworks got faster as well.
@Scott: Absolutely they did, and that's Ruby/Rails' real hope in seriously scalable service deployment. The fact that everyone and their mother is trying to build stuff on Rails right now is a really good sign-- it means that there's a lot of incentive to make it faster in the places where it turns out to be slow.
That being said, it's still true that your desktop app's users upgrade OS/frameworks over time and take care of the perf problem "for you", whereas in a service, you are responsible for the maintenance required to take advantage of framework improvements. And building/maintaining real services can a monster pain in the neck even when things are going well, so there's a cost there.
by Ben — Feb 06
@Scott: Absolutely they did, and that's Ruby/Rails' real hope in seriously scalable service deployment. The fact that everyone and their mother is trying to build stuff on Rails right now is a really good sign-- it means that there's a lot of incentive to make it faster in the places where it turns out to be slow.
That being said, it's still true that your desktop app's users upgrade OS/frameworks over time and take care of the perf problem "for you", whereas in a service, you are responsible for the maintenance required to take advantage of framework improvements. And building/maintaining real services can a monster pain in the neck even when things are going well, so there's a cost there.