Amazon goes Ruby on Rails
Posted by David November 29, 2006 @ 09:35 PM
Never thought you’d hear that, eh? But that’s exactly what unspun.amazon.com is. A Rails application sitting on the Amazon.com domain. Adam Selipsky from Amazon Web Services introduces the site with this:
UnSpun helps you to find and create ranked lists by gathering votes from workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk and from the UnSpun community. We show the popular opinion, with no “spin” (hence the name)—along with links to websites with more information about the particular items on the list. If you don’t see the list you are looking for, simply create it and rankings will start populating within a few minutes. 2,294 ranked lists are already on UnSpun, holding 640,107 items, with more coming in all the time.
Congratulations to the AWS team at Amazon!
Coming shortly, we’ll have a bunch of other announcements for high-profile companies going Ruby on Rails for various new projects. Exciting times.
Never? Come on… We’ve been expecting this ever since 20 Juli 2006. ;-)
The site’s throwing a rails application error @ the moment.
The “Application error (Rails)” greeting is awesome!
D’oh! “Application Error (Rails)” at that address…not Slashdotted AFAIK. Guess that at least proves it’s really running RoR.
Seems to be working again. Nice to see yet another Rails application by a company this size.
It helps when Bezos is a partner at 37signals to push Rails at Amazon.
not overly restful
I wish this was making me feel better, but the fact that I keep getting errors on the site and when it does work it seems to run really slow is not the best endorsement….
The site keeps crapping out
“It helps when Bezos is a partner at 37signals to push Rails at Amazon.”
I don’t think Bezos micromanages Amazon’s teams telling their developers what technologies to use. Amazon developers are more than competent enough to make those decisions themselves.
did you mean exiting times? HTTP/1.1 Server ErrorDate: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:53:08 GMT Server: Server Set-Cookie: _session_id=47ef518f54376617be535b8590b9e14e; domain=amazon.com; path=/; expires=Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:46:09 GMT Cache-Control: no-cache Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Given the comments, I don’t understand two things:
Wow, yet another toy rails app!
I am pretty sure you can edit the public/500.html file to change the error if you want.
For the record, the problem yesterday was not caused by rails, but rather a faulty deployment of only part of our code.
Joe Grossberg/Skeeterbug: Yes, you can change the default error page which we do. However, because only part of our code was deployed we got the default message in the framework.
Having the vote on the left and “Your ranking” doesn’t seem that intuitive. I’ve been watching a few lists change (apparently people clicking on the vote up and down) but no additional rankings and no major changes to the rankings
Having the vote on the left and Your ranking doesn’t seem that intuitive. I’ve been watching a few lists change (apparently people clicking on the vote up and down) but no additional rankings and no major changes to the rankings
Having the vote on the left and Your ranking doesn’t seem that intuitive. I’ve been watching a few lists change (apparently people clicking on the vote up and down) but no additional rankings and no major changes to the rankings
Mark: Yes, the position of an item changes because of voting as well as people ranking the itme.
Where would you put the “Add” functionality for “Your Ranking?”
Not bad. Fun idea and I think the use of mturk to seed the listings is one of the more better uses of the service I’ve seen.
Short-term issues:
Long-term issues:
Andrew: I live the ranking system you have, but I don’t like the voting as well, espcially since in most cases a “vote” isn’t enough to change its place in the rank, but “ranking” has a huge impact.
I’d probably remove the voting arrows and have the link for “Your Ranking” say something about voting and be easier to identify on the page.
Not bad. Fun idea and I think the use of mturk to seed the listings is one of the more better uses of the service I’ve seen. * Short-term issues: * The list and comment layouts need more lovin’. * The numbers to the right of a list item are a little confusing as hell. After a moment, I could surmise that they represented some kind of point system. I think people would get percentages a lot easier. Yes, it comes at the cost of losing some information about the absolute amount of votes, but sometimes you do have to lose information to convey it effectively. * Long-term issues: * Of course there are going to be canonicalization issues, but I want to see a clever solution for them because they’re really a pain (two entries for the same thing). * Some kind of standardization for books, places, movies, people, quotes, etc. is really going to help. I know it’s a tough balance between easy freeform input and data usefulness, but limitations will definitely encourage focus in this case.
Sorry for the multi-post. Mephisto is still not updating the static page from when I left a comment yesterday.
No way to search the current list, so people keep adding variants and adding to the confusion.
There should be a single place (at the top) to add an item to the list and it should show existing matches before you add yet another duplicate.
肉
Any information on the platform they’re using? Mongrel?
Just because it has a big company’s logo on it doesn’t mean it’s anything but another completely useless pet project which wastes thousands of processor cycles doing nothing interesting whatsoever.
It is great that amazon is working with Rails and hopefully the backng of a big vendor will give us all credence when we try to plug using rails as a technology solution instead of the beaten track java/.net/php. I just wish Amazon’s first foray wasn’t such a clone of rateitall.com, which has been doing sort of user ratings for years.