In a departure from our usual posts, we’ve got some news about the hidden workhorse of Many Eyes: the server side application. If you’re interested in the technology behind Many Eyes, read on. If not, feel free to skip to the last paragraph to see what this means for the future of the site.

Since November 8th, you’ve been using the new Ruby on Rails version of Many Eyes! You may have used it already if you’ve used the New York Times’ Visualization Lab.

Doing a full rewrite of an application is not something to be taken lightly, but we’re confident that the move to Rails has been well worth it. It’s been a joy to develop, and the site is running faster than ever.

“Faster?” We can almost hear you say. “I heard Ruby was slow!”

While it’s true that Ruby isn’t the fastest executing language around, Ruby is faster in a few important ways. It’s taken less time and fewer lines of code to produce equivalent functionality in Ruby, and it’s been easier to optimize the application. In the end, this means our application actually runs faster.

Last but not least, there have been a few small changes to the site, such as the new dataset tag cloud and the ability to change your display name and profile under “my stuff.”

So what does this mean? It means that Many Eyes is now running on a system that is more flexible and easier to maintain, which will allow us to add new features more quickly. With that in mind, we would love to hear your feedback! What would you like to see on the site next?

We’ve moved over to our new server, and the site is back up and running.

Please feel free to jump right in – it should feel nice and zippy. We’re still working on making sure all the old links and embedded visualizations behave properly, so don’t be too concerned. We’ll have all of that working over the next day or so.

If you see anything unusual, feel free to contact us via the usual channels.

From Friday at 6pm EST until Saturday 3pm EST, Many Eyes will down for scheduled maintenance. We’re moving to a new server and doing some data migration. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, but we think you’ll enjoy the performance upgrade. It may be back up before then, so feel free to check back early.

We’ll have some more news coming soon, so stay tuned!

Photo credit: Flickr user jphilipg