The question came up in the course of using RabbitMQ of how to ensure that if something catastrophic happens that the system wouldn't lose any data due to either side of the queue coming down unexpectedly.

We had the exchange and the queues both set as 'durable', which we thought should cover everything. Right?

Apparently not.

In addition to the exchange and queues needing to be durable, the messages themselves must be flagged as 'persistent'.

I've been a member of an online Star Wars club for...wow...almost 10 years now. At the time that I joined I was just learning about databases and web-programming and was rather impressed with the functionality that existed (and still exists) in the club's website.

However...

The site is coded in old-school ASP, with SQL Server on the backend.

I cringe just thinking about it.

I've been trying to convince The Powers That Be for a while now to look at recoding the site to some other environment. For a long time I tried to push them towards PHP, but they just dug in their heels and refused to look at that option really.

Then I discover Ruby on Rails, and I see how much better RoR would be for this site. It would provide structure to the codebase, organization, and seriously increase readability. And since the club is a volunteer organization, with a pretty regular rate of people transitioning in/out of positions, having a strong test suite would be HUGE towards helping new developers ramp up on how the system is supposed to work and quickly identifying when a change in the code has broken something else in an unforeseen manner.

Of course as I'm making those discoveries, The Powers That Be decide to move ahead with PHP...

So, on to the question at hand: What do you do, what information do you use, in an attempt to convince someone to switch from an older technology (ASP, PHP) to Ruby on Rails?