I haven’t done much web programming in awhile. As far as I can tell, MRI’s integration of YARV’s going to solve most of RoR’s problems. I’m using it next time I code a web app.

Also, I’m not lazy, just at the time I had very little skill at finding the right documentation. Now I’m pretty good at it.

I’d rather not continue this subject, as I’m not much interested in it any more.

Happy coding!

CakePHP was developed as a PHP port of Rails. All this easy stuff on Cake is pretty much the same on Rails (just in ruby). Don’t be lazy, learn it! Ruby is a lot easier than PHP. What takes 100 lines in PHP will take probably 25-30 lines in ruby.

CakePHP is good for small projects such as blogs and forums, Rails is great for huge projects such as Twitter, Amazon, and Facebook.

DT: I agree with most of what you’re saying, but Luiji was merely pointing out why he prefers CakePHP.

Luiji: Sacrificing OOP is only acceptable within the scope of a framework that allows you to encapsulate code via some other means … which is very much like using OOP. Without this, you cannot create a maintainable codebase. You need to be able to write DRY, easily maintainable code.

Both DT & Luiji: Your arguments about speed are nil, in my opinion, because you haven’t done the research to discover that Rails is faster than the popular PHP frameworks, eg. CodeIgniter and CakePHP [1]. While PHP generally performs faster than Ruby, Ruby web frameworks *greatly* outperform PHP ones, in general. I think this is because Ruby is optimized to work with lots and lots of objects in memory, whereas OOP has been added to PHP and it’s not nearly as optimized.

Also, PHP is like CGI in that you typically load the *ENTIRE* environment into memory for each request, which is a very old-school way of doing web development. Most modern web development frameworks (Ruby/Python/.NET/Java) load the application into memory once, instead of on each request. This greatly improves response times.

Ruby also has the advantage of having numerous implementations. JRuby is very mature and might be the fastest Ruby VM for running Rails 3 [2]. MacRuby is becoming a big contender, as well. Ofcourse, a side benefit of all of Ruby’s implementations is that you can access very fast, mature .NET/Java/Objective-C (and more) libraries from Ruby, as well as standard C libraries.

Regarding deployment, PHP can be deployed just as easily as Rails and many PHP shops favor Capistrano for deployment! One doesn’t have any advantage over the other. There are also good free & cheap hosts for both PHP and Rails.

Testing. This is the number 1 reason why I dislike coding PHP nowadays. I have written lots of PHP over the years and I’ve written PHP code as recently as a few months ago. Ruby has MUCH better testing tools. This is really unfortunate because it creates a barrier to entry for PHP developers to start testing and test-driving their code.

Regardless of the programming language or the framework you use, testing is the #1 most important thing for delivering quality, bug-free, maintainable software!

[1]: http://merbist.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/benchmarks.png
[2]: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/rails-and-merb-merge-performance-part-2-of-6/

rant over.

PHP = ad-hoc language usefull for making a mess and maintenance nightmares

Rails out of the box? hmmm…how long does it take to write very basic UNIX commands in a shell? Well yea thats how long it took for me to setup Rails. How long does it take to deploy a rails app straight from repo? Again… two words my friend “cap deploy”…not only that I can deploy to several different servers at ONCE using the same command.

PHP is good for certain things but for something large it is simply not worth the hassle working with it. We write our binary processors in PHP NOT Ruby, we write our logging system in C…why? because its fast….we write our portals and applications in ruby and use the rails framework simply because its GOOD!

What is your professional expeirence with Ruby? I highly doubt its been much from what I’ve gathered…

…look I cant be arsed talking crap about which is best or whatever…we use them all and for web applications nothing really touches the development speed of Rails…as for scalability…read that article.

….read the article I posted. 300 million page views per month and they have very goos response time and server side processing.

READ READ READ!!!!

When will we ever hear the end of the “rails is slow” crap…seriously!

First: speed is a stupid argument? SPEED IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS OF AN APPLICATION!!!

Ruby doc may be “fantastic”, however I learned the ins and outs of CakePHP programming in a week, and I’ve been using rails for a year.

It took me half an hour to set up my first Rails application, and three minutes for my first CakePHP application. The fact of the matter is that Rails doesn’t work out of the box (no matter how much they say it does).

There are a huge number of developers that prefer procedural over OOP. Why do you think that C is so popular? (Not that I like C.) I personally love OOP, but I’m willing to sacrifice it. With the modular architectures of both frameworks, including MVP and Convention Over Configuration, management is actually quite easy without OOP.

“PHP is a hack language.” Not sure what that means…do you mean it’s generally a bad language? That’s a huge matter of opinion. Both closures and blocks are in PHP as far as I can tell.

=== Agreements ===

You corrected me on the speed information.

I haven’t done much in testing, but it seems that Rails does have an easier testing framework.

=== Finally ===

“Unless you have worked professionally using Rails”. I have.

I am not trying to say CakePHP is better then RoR. The arguments I had listed were just to explain why I personally like CakePHP more. I believe that each is better for different purposes.

1) more “inexperienced” programmer know PHP. Better programmers and experienced developers can and will learn a new language with ease.

2) Rails is piss easy to setup. Migrations are a LOT more efficient and easier to use than Cake’s Bake!

3) There are servers called “Dedicated” which, when writing professional applications is generally the prefered choice for the client….you get what you pay for. Shared hosting is simply nonsense for anything more than a personal blog of personal home page.

4) Rails is pretty damn fast when you KNOW how to optimise it and write good maintainable effiecient code.

5) I do!!!! Have you ever worked on a system with over 100’000 lines of code in PHP? I have and PHP = nightmare to maintain which in turn = a LOT more time finding bugs, adding changes and of course not to mention, cakePHP with its lack of a proper testing framework (where rails excels) imakes for a pretty horrid time at work.

6) Ruby doc is fantastic…Ruby has been around for as long as PHP…Rails is a fantastic framework. Easy to learn, easy to setup and easy to deploy applications. Easy to maintain, easy to share amongst other developers, easier….you get the message.

Unless you have worked professionally using Rails I’d keep your opinion to yourself. I have worked with both frameworks and currently the company I work for is binning PHP altogether and switching entirely to Rails and so far the results are a heck of a lot better than what we could do with PHP.

PHP is a hack language. No proper convention, not even a proper OOP language. No closures, blocks and the testing frameworks are a complete pain in the ass.

Speed….hmmm…what a stupid argument!

http://highscalability.com/friends-sale-architecture-300-million-page-view-month-facebook-ror-app

ASP.NET MVC is closer to other development frameworks, so it’s not that difficult to jump back and forth. If you are already comfortable with .NET then ASP.NET MVC is the obvious choice. It’s all about productivity.

I’ve done some Rails and although it’s nice, I was already familiar with CakePHP, so that was my obvious choice.

Good luck!

These are a few remarks that I’d like to add :
- Ruby is an amazing programming language that involves agile development methods that will rock your world (if you have time look at Rspec and Cucumber)
- It has a quite small learning curve
- Rails has a huge and friendly community
- Using Linux or Mac OSX makes your life easier when you work daily with Ruby
- You’ll never loose your time learning Ruby, it can always make you better developer to learn a new language!

Have fun!

Both Rails and .NET frameworks can easily support your requirements. If you’re going to spend the time to develop your application, I would ask myself … which tool do I most enjoy working with? Maybe this is a good excuse for you to take the time to learn Rails so you can use it on future projects (Rails is a great tool to be familiar with for rapidly developing web applications). Maybe you have a reason to continue using ASP.NET [MVC] and … that might be the right tool.

I use Rails because:
– It’s significantly faster / easier to create Rails applications than ASP.NET apps
– I love Ruby
– I enjoy programming with Ruby/Rails more than programming against the CLR (C#)

If you code your application in Rails, it will likely take less time to develop and you’ll end up with a smaller, more maintainable codebase.

In the end … it’s really up to you! This is coming from an ex-ASP.NET developer, now Rails developer.

Thank you