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A new holy war? PHP vs Ruby on Rails

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urlwolf:
There is a post at Oreilly's from a person that seems to have tried both heavily (not doing a 'hello word' on each is not testing) and seems to be in love with Ruby on Rails:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/01/php_vs_ruby_on_rails_an_evolu.html

Of course the web is plagued with contrary views too.

The experiment I just posted is done using ruby on rails. I'm pretty impressed by the fact that all sql is handled by the framework, and even the interface to the DB. In fact, one can switch from sqlite to Mysql without altering the main code. Doing that in e.g., perl DBI would be impossible (dunno about PHP).

I'm considering dedicating some effort (e.g., a week) to Ruby and rails.
What's your take on Ruby and rails in particular?

mouser:
my 2 cents:

Ruby on Rails is quite nice.

But it's frustrating to try to compare it to other languages because its really a Framework on top of a language.
Comparing Ruby On Rails to PHP is not really fair - there are TONS of frameworks for PHP that are trying to provide the same functionality as Rails, and very few people ever compare them to Ruby on Rails.

In some sense you see this kind of debate all the time, where people say they love product X, when it's really nothing to do with product X that they love, but rather some auxiliary feature of X.

I'm not particularly thrilled with Ruby syntax or design decisions - but i fully recognize the speed that you can develop safe web applications with Rails.  It is a highly structured framework that really forces you into a very specific way of designing a tool - which is not common in language frameworks.  I can't help but feel that some of the love for Rails is due to this well thought out and highly structured system which guides you through designing your service.  It's almost like you are modifying an existing "tool" rather than using a language.

So, if Ruby on Rails matches well with the tool you want to create, it could definitely save you some time and pain and help you create something really nice.  I'm just reluctant to say it has much to do with Ruby the language..

urlwolf:

So, if Ruby on Rails matches well with the tool you want to create, it could definitely save you some time and pain and help you create something really nice.  I'm just reluctant to say it has much to do with Ruby the language..
-mouser (January 30, 2007, 02:10 PM)
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The point of this author is that everything works so fluently *because* of the design decisions in ruby itself (last paragraph).

I haven't tried ruby enough to say if I like the syntax. I though that everything being an objects (even integers with methods? 5.times?) would be too much overhead and make it slow. While it's certainly slower than python and perl, it seems to be no slouch.

mouser:
i am a big fan of object oriented programming, so to the extent that ruby is a more pure object-based language is definitely a good thing.  although the author does say exactly as you describe, it's not the impression i got from my rudimentary studying of ruby and ruby on rails.

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