Ruby on Rails or PHP... Somehow uncertain

Question

Hi everybody... I've been thinking about this a long time now but I want to hear your opinion because I always receive the best answers here. So any advance... thank you guys.

Right now I have to make this decision:

Shift a prototype webservice to production quality. Choose either Ruby or PHP... (Background: A friend of mine is joining the project and prefers rails)

I've already played around a bit with RoR (only basic stuff) but I am really disappointed about the documentation of Rails and Ruby. In relation to PHP I find only fragments or hard-to-use references. At the end I am a bit scared. I don't want to waste my time realizing that I am not capable of doing s.th in Ruby what I could with PHP. Maybe only because I am too stupid and don't find a proper explanation ;-)

Did anyone experience this shift and can tell me how easy/hard it was to switch from PHP to Ruby? E.G. would you recommend programming it in PHP and using MVC as a base pattern?

Thanks for your opinion!!!

Answer 1

I think you should determine for yourself if you're comfortable switching langauges. If you are an advanced developer you may not have problems with the new syntax/paradigm. However, one thing you might want to consider is what the site is going to be used for and how much traffic you anticipate. I have read articles where RoR has trouble scaling past a certain threshold, etc... i.e. Twitter. Also, there are much more OSS components available to PHP if you plan on some code re-use, etc. Like you, I have only played with RoR but some people swear by it. It's sorta like the Mac people out there in a way... I haven't switched myself, but I have read RoR is really easy to use and is very intuitive compared to PHP.

Answer 2

It's not that hard and the documentation is there, it's just less centralized then PHP's. For a similar documentation style on Ruby and RoR try http://apidock.com - it features a php.net like community driven documentation interface.

Also a great way how to get up to speed with rails is http://railscasts.com. This is a series of screencasts about various rails related topics.

I prefer Rails too - and used to program with PHP before. It definetely has many advantages over PHP, but it is largely a preference thing.

Answer 3

Choose whatever programming language you and your friend feel you can both quickly get up to speed and ship a quality product with in a reasonable amount of time.

Answer 4

There's no definitive answer what is "the better" choice.

But remember: Rails is not a language, it's a complete framework. If you want to compare things, you have to compare Ruby with PHP and Rails with something like the Zend Framework.