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Ruby on Rails Appeals to PHP Programmers

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current event by markmcb on 26 October 2006, tagged as webdesign and computing

Sitepoint's "The State of Web Development 2006/2007" paper cited an interesting statistic showing PHP programmers being the most likely group to switch to Ruby on Rails. More interesting was the reported gap between PHP and other languages in terms of the likelihood of a programmer jumping ship.

Matthew Magain, the article's author said, "This surprised me, because it’s the Java developers that the Rails movement is targeting ... [h]ere’s the question: do PHP coders know what they’re getting in for? Not to suggest that all PHP developers are burrowing away in an unstructured manner (we all know there are plenty of PHP frameworks these days that provide MVC separation and other similar benefits to Rails), but I wonder how many PHP developers are actually using them. Looking at some of the code out there, my guess is less than half."

Whether these statistics represent a fad or a trend is debatable, but two years after its birth Ruby on Rails is definitely still sparking interest in the web development community.

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Toying with Rails by markmcb :: NR7

I've been toying with Rails now for about a month (really only a few days if you count all the days I haven't touched it). As a PHP programmer on OmniNerd, I must say that I like both the Ruby language and the Rails framework. There are some drawbacks, but they've seemed minor so far.

The key thing I've found with Rails is that it makes writing a new app fun in that you spend more time thinking about what you want to implement and not so much every little detail of how. For example, let's say you're writing some OmniNerd code and you need to be able to process the title of a person's comment:

  • PHP - I need to ensure there is a database table that stores the title of comments. I need to write an HTML form to accept the title and assign a text field a name. Using that name, I have to catch the POST varible after the submit and parse it to ensure it's within the limitations of a comment title. If it was incorrect, I need to write functions to display an error message, re-post the form and fill in the fields with the old data. Once complete, I need to escape the input and put it in the database.
  • Rails - I need to ensure there is a database table that stores the title of comments. I write a line or two telling Rails what a title looks like. I call a function to make a form. I call a function to handle errors.

... even a non-coder can see the hassle that's removed. Multiply this situation by 100 and you see the great burden a framework like Rails offers.

To be fair, Rails is a framework and PHP is a language. Of the frameworks available for php, none appealed to me too much. We'll see how it goes. If you're a web developer, I'd at least write a simple app in Rails just to see what all the hype is about. I think you'll enjoy it. If nothing else, be sure to flip through why's poignant guide to Ruby. It's quite entertaining.

Posted 27 October 2006, Hide, Reply