Thanks for the words of encouragement. It seems to me that whenever you have an opinion about any language (or anything else!) you are bound to tick off someone!

Stefan

You do not need to reinforce your article. It can stand on its own, and commenting on its accuracy won’t make them go away, just make them comment more. If you believe what you wrote, stick by it, it wasn’t a bad piece.

-Rick

I first wrote the piece because the Twitter news (that turned out to be false … ) reminded me of my experience.

I don’t think I am bashing; I’m just pointing out things about Ruby that we ran across when looking into it.

… If telling the truth about the state of things is bashing, I humbly suggest you need to reevaluate. If I would have praised Ruby for it’s elegant syntax, or Rails for it’s excellent RAD features – would that be pumping?

Stefan

Use whatever makes you happy, but why bash something you don’t use with outdated FUD?

I’m a PHP developer by day and a Rails developer evenings/weekends, so I’m aware of both sides of the fence.

I’d recommend giving RoR a look NOW and seeing how things have moved on, then you’ll be better placed to write a blog post detailing how PHP is better than RoR.

I will concede that the Twitter article has been refuted … when I wrote the piece I was not aware of that.

That said, Alex Payne’s statement still stands. My own experience and findings are not BS … it is what we found – period.

I used PHP for this particular project and found it to be the better choice given all my criteria at the time. That said, I am not a PHP zealot and I have developed many more applications in my career with Java than any other language … including PHP.

I have also stated that I think Ruby has great things going for it. In fact we DO use it in an application that is currently running.

PS: our traffic is fine as it is.

Stefan

Step 1) Find community of zealots
Step 2) Take (discredited) article from a month ago
Step 3) Take (probably BS) anecdote from a year ago
Step 4) Recommend PHP, which’ll really piss ’em off
Step 5) Maek poast

I’ll bet your traffic went through the roof, and you might even wind up getting Slashdotted. Congrats.

Since people want details, I will provide them.

Preamble:

It had been a while since we looked at Ruby seriously, so I had forgotten the specific reasons (beyond what I mention above) why we went with PHP over Ruby. Luckily, I spoke to someone who was on my team at the time, and he was able to refresh my memory.

The issues:

In general, aside from the pragmatic programmers, a year ago, very little documentation existed, also getting a webhost that supported RoR was a pain in the ass since there really wasn’t a standard configuration for FastCGI to work properly.

.. We were working with our own live dedicated servers and did not want to risk taking it down to get Ruby to work with Apache.

I think another thing worth citing, is the RTFM attitude of the RoR community (at the time) versus the feature-rich and procedurally mature PHP community. While as a whole, the PHP community may not have a mature OO-background, but on the plus side, the attitudes fostered in that community lend themselves to more forum posts, message boards and code samples, rather than sifting through mailing lists where elitist nerds take pot shots at each other.

… This was a year ago … and I don’t know how this is today.

The business side of things:

From a business perspective, we wanted a solution that would work with as little time spent as possible building components … Zend had IBM backing it, RoR had 37Signals and that was about it.

In terms of components, just getting image resizing to work out of the box proved to be tricky (at the time) since, if I recall correctly, ImageMagick was the only option and a non-beta solution didn’t really exist.

Stefan

I need to address a few comments:

“for someone who wanted to dig a little big deeper, it looks like you decided to stop digging as soon as you found what you wanted to find.”

“Essentially, you’ve tried to equate “done research” with “heard rumors and speculation.” ”

The ‘digging’ I was speaking of was done about a year and a half ago, way before this whole Twitter thing came about. The Twitter news and the interview with Payne (which some comments seem to ignore ..) served only to remind me of our own findings back then.

As I stated in the article:

“… I haven’t looked at Ruby and Rails since that time, but I am sure things have progressed. That said, this …”

So yes, I’m sure progress has been made.

“How can you consider PHP vs. Rails vs. JSP/Servlets? Rails is a framework built with Ruby. PHP is not a framework – it’s analogous to Ruby. And why compare JSP/Servlets to Rails or PHP?”

You guys are getting picky ..

For PHP we ended up using the Zend Framework and for the Java option, I would have probably gone with my own simple MVC framework I had put together in years past.

The article was not looking at the specifics, I was only speaking in generalities .. global issues.

With regards to ASP.net:

It has some good things, but I don’t like getting into the Mircrosoft camp because they have a tendency of trying to lock you in. OK, ‘tendency’ may be understating the true story.

Stefan