Ruby on Rails vs PHP?

RoR is great if you can support it. PHP installations usually have most of the functions you're going to need already. You'll also get fewer coders who want to assume either - but with PHP you know you're going to get a bunch of shit, 9/10 times.

I know of 4 developers that swear by RoR, 1 of which ripped out all I wrote in PHP in favour of RoR for the main site of a large company. Both scripts were MVC-based, both scripts were 100% modular, he just preferred to do it in RoR, but identical site at the end.

That logic I don't understand - is it to keep him maintaining the code knowing how few RoR developers there are, is it because his PHP knowledge was less than RoR, I don't think so, it's just he preferred RoR.

RoR developers say it takes less time to develop than in PHP, but I disagree. The example above took about half the time to develop in PHP, although I think it's because I knew the db better, not sure.

If you can get this done in PHP, then go for it, but knowing the project, it absolutely *must* be an MVC framework or else it will never work the way you want it to - that I'm sure about

and fwiw, I got very interested in RoR, invested time understanding it and can write a hello world tour with members area, but that is as far as I went - there isn't the interest from clients for RoR than there is PHP, so why waste my time?

I'm working with someone thats developing something in RoR and I have to say, it's coming along pretty fast. I have my concerns, but they are going to stay with the project and this is what they want to use.

from a man in da know

I agree, MVC is the way to go... I should really release my own framework I've developed over the past 10 years to the public, I'm sure the PHP community would love it...

But I'm torn, I'm also a big supporter of private enterprise and my framework has been hard won. It's my bread and butter and I can develop things in a fraction of the time it takes other developers.

Being OO, completely modular, and using true MVC design principals so that I can swap out a data source without ever touching a controller or view... I use DatabaseObjects for example:

Class User extends MySQLObject, it has common methods used across any Parent DB Object Class...

$user = new User($id);
$user->getFormData();
$user->updateDB();

That's all I need to write in order to process form data, populate the new data for a user row and update the database... Everything is handled out of my way, cleaning, escaping, structuring the SQL, etc...

If I want to handle users through LDAP, it's easy

Class User extends LDAPObject

$user = new User($id);
$user->getFormData();
$user->updateDB();

I have prebuilt parent classes for SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, LDAP, and even flat file storage... I can swap from data source to data source with a few characters worth of changes...

Anyway, probably boring 99% of the people in here but that's an insight into the data side of things in my own code :P

+1 MVC

I think this is why I see zero benefit of RoR. After many years, I have my preferred set of classes or "base" to start any site from, including config dir, common classes/includes, modified/hacked Smarty and AdoDB libraries, etc...

So to me, the "ability to set things up faster with RoR" doesn't apply and IMO that is really the only thing it has going for it right now.

It's always good to know though, as the more languages you can know will only help you. Especially once you find out the high-paying freelance work is in fixing other people's work, not doing your own from scratch

Toe hee!!

Is their a rails like frame work for PHP.

Here is a video of a tool I use http://www.deklarit.com/demo/

americans don't say chap

here is a nice read for you
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/...ck_to_p_1.html

I always recommend to any new clients that are looking to build an application from scratch to go with what is already out there, and improve upon it. In this case I use CakePHP for all new, fresh projects that require the MVC design, rapid application development, and structure that is lacking from a completely new project. Afterall, I get to shape it and make it the way I want, Cake just keeps it clean, organized and functional.

Plus, RoR happy guys will respect PHP more when they try out Cake, because it's modeled after RoR