… If you want to compare Rails to something, compare it to the Zend Framework or CakePHP or some of the many other PHP based frameworks that provide the same functionality as Rails.

Meanwhile, good luck getting Ruby to work well with Apache …

Stefan

Just a thing as pagination of posts, in php? Atleast 50 lines of code. In rails?
“@posts = Post.paginate :per_page => 5, :page => params['page'], rder => ‘created_at desc’ “. Yes, thats all.

My weblog contains 305 lines of code. Tagging, Posting, Signup, Tagcloud, Comment, Administration, pagination. How long is yours in PHP?

I’ve leaned a lot from Ruby on Rails in terms exercising my neurons to avoid unneeded code.

The main Ruby advantage is that the first serious web framework made available (RoR) glued up all the design patterns that the Java community was still trying to understand in a simple to use and understandable manner.

PHP on the other side has far too many so-called frameworks that are popular but miss the simplicity approach to design patterns that Rails has.

Now I’m trying the Akelos framework, which has really ported Rails simplicity to PHP (not like Cake and Symphony). The most important reason for moving to Ruby, has now an alternative on PHP, so this might decrease the avalanche of people leaving PHP for “Rails”

My current application is a mix of PHP and Ruby on Rails.

I’m using Rails to build the web frontend and mySQL interaction, and I’m using PHP to expose the database as a text backend to an object in Second Life. Works quite well, as long as I keep the schema that rails is using updated in the PHP code; but the PHP application is only 4 classes and a dispatcher, so it’s not that hard.

Both have their uses. The real key is knowing which to use where.

Rails is awesome for user interaction, and PHP is invaluable as a backend interface where I need to specify things my own way; rails’ sensible defaults are useful, but can get in the way when you *need* to do something a little differently.

In my case, I’m limited to a 2048 byte reply, so I have to go with text only replies.

Rails can do text, but it’s a pain in the butt to dispatch a text list of instructions in the reply due to the output view templates. PHP does much better at this with procedural generation of the list using objects for scatter/gather of data and exposing the gathered data in whatever order I need; some returns require 5 lines returned, some require 17, some even more!

Rails can’t do this as well due to it’s strict adherence to MVC and DRY.

The way I’ve written my client, PHP generated instructions can be processed in any order; but rails forces me into a strict order due to the view template.

I realize I could use partial renders to build up a page, but it’s actually taken me less code to do it in PHP.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion — Make a choice for yourself and use what you need!

PHP is now object oriented, it has web frameworks similar to rails (you several to choose from) and has ORM.

… PHP has some legacy issues (inconsistent naming of functions etc …) but to me, they are minor distractions from a much larger and more important picture: PHP is not what it was years ago.

In fact, I found the Zend Framework to be a nice structure to work with. We used it to help build a new video sharing, social networking site (http://www.idea22.com) that is totally modular.

We are still in beta (and are tweaking many things,) yet at this early stage we can drop components in and out the framework and even introduce major new features into the application relatively easily … as we will be over the next couple of weeks.

Stefan

1. PHP is faster.
2. PHP is mature.
3. PHP hosting is easy to find and consistent.

I was worried that I would be halfway into a project and find myself having to drop down to C to get something done because an aspect of the Ruby language was lacking …

Or worse, I was worried that we would have tremendous problems getting Ruby to play with Apache.

… We have our own web servers for various reasons and so we had to be sure that our own crew could manage Ruby. We fuddled for a bit, but quickly ran into installation and speed issues.

Stefan