[General] Ruby vs. PHP

[bashar abdullah]

Thanks all for sharing your thoughts. I have looked at symfony and CakePHP
quickly before. Symfony appealed to me more, but I cannot give technical
analysis yet. I came across another very interesting, yet still new,
framework called Akelos <http://www.akelos.org/>. The one thing that
appealed to me about it from the start is the internationalization in mind.
>From the moment of creating the application, you specify which languages you
want. Unlike Symfony and Ruby on Rails. No strong community is yet behind
it, but if you are welling, you may find it useful.

Prado is completely new to me, but looking at the syntax, I think you are
right for non .Net users the syntax does look strange to me.

For comparison between different php frameworks (osama yours missing sorry
:)), see here <http://www-users.mat.uni.torun.pl/%7Etomahawk/summary.php>.

I am going currently with Ruby on Rails, but I don't believe something is
perfect, or there is just such a thing as the BEST full stop. Everything has
drawbacks and from what I've seen, Ruby on Rails suffers in those areas:

1- Internationalization: No support for it at all. Perhaps you can find work
around but other than that, no. So if you are freelancer who expects to get
work in multi-lang, it's not gonna help a lot.
2- Scalability: You cannot talk to more than 1 DB right now. If you are
planning something huge that will have thousands of users, it may not be
suitable. Read this
interview<http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/>with
developer of twitter, perhaps largest online rails app right now.
3- It's not for integration. Ruby on Rails is designed to be a  stand alone
web application, if you want to utilize the power of the DB migration. The
guys behind RoR them selves state they prefer to do the data constraint
handling from the application level and not DB level, to make it easier to
modify the constraint in the future. If the DB is used by multiple-parties,
this ofcourse is not feasible.
4- RoR was built for certain objective in mind and may not be useful in all
type of projects. One need to study his project carefully before deciding to
go with any language not only RoR.

So why am I going with RoR?

1- Shorter and faster development cycles.
2- I love the MVC and Object Modeling they have
3- For my own projects, I do not intend to introduce multiple languages
right now, and in the future, one can expect a solution will have to come.
4- I am not expecting hundreds of thousands of users, and if I was, i
wouldn't be using shared host anyways :)
5- No integration is planned right now at all. I mean by that, the DB will
only be used by my application.

However I do note I have to keep the door open to Php, and once I have time,
I want to learn some PHP Framework up to certain level at least to be ready
for possible projects that do not suit RoR, and also being ready for the
worse to happen.


Salam
Bashar

On 9/26/07, Majed B. <majedb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Great info!
>
> I've been checking PHP frameworks today and people have recommended
> CakePHP & Symfony. I'll check Prado along the way.
>
> I have an old project which got halted because I wrote a lot of
> redundant & repetitive code, and couldn't really create a
> template-friendly design and instead got my HTML code linked with the
> logic & DB code :/    -- Totally uncool!
>
> Hopefully with the help of frameworks I'd be able to clean my work &
> finish this project.
> --
>        Majed B.
>
> _______________________________________________
> General mailing list
> General at oskw.org
> http://mail.oskw.org/mailman/listinfo/general_oskw.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://oskw.org/pipermail/general_oskw.org/attachments/20070926/f8755a25/attachment.html>