Now I'm not bashing anything by this comment, but I'm surprised they built it in Ruby/Rails.
It doesn't really match the traditional integration paths that they're going to have to deal with across direct.gov.uk and I'm genuinely not sure it'll scale up that high if they are pushing people down that route.
We all know what happens once a year when we have to do our tax returns and that's all on a huge Java EE cluster apparently.
That RoR isn't typical for government is much of the point. They've been spending 20x too much for one-tenth of what they should have: moving to traditional web tech is a pretty brilliant step forward.
As regards scaling, it's a valid concern but one I suspect they'll have considered. A good number of brilliant people work there (I've visited and know the crowd).
direct.gov has been a monumental failure, which is why it is being canned (at vast cost due to contractual terms, I believe). If the "traditional integration paths" are broken they will need fixing too.
It doesn't really match the traditional integration paths that they're going to have to deal with across direct.gov.uk and I'm genuinely not sure it'll scale up that high if they are pushing people down that route.
We all know what happens once a year when we have to do our tax returns and that's all on a huge Java EE cluster apparently.