Ruby on Rails and PHP
What’s the difference between them? Lets find out more about it. Which one is better? Ruby or PHP? The answer is relative, its all depends on the developer, which one they like the most. Among all website builder, all of them have their own strength and weakness.
Ruby has been designed from the ground up as an object oriented language, and has a well thought out syntax. While has a much more extensive library of extensions and modules, and it’s object oriented model has been implemented over time.
Ruby’s community and as well as libraries are growing, but it is no where near the number of PHP’s. As a language Ruby is slower than PHP, but this is a bottleneck that can be worked around. The real issue is with Rails and its tightly coupled architecture.
Rails is a framework – a contract on how an applications architecture’s base will be implemented. 9 times out of 10 Rubiest think framework first ( Rails ) vs Language first; they were introduced ruby via rails. 9.9 times out of 10 perl,php, and python people think language first. The success of Rails has brought about an implementation of it MVC structure to perl, php, and python which has enabled perl,php, and python use to ADOPT BEST PRACTICES via Frameworks like symfony,zend,cakephp, django, joomla framework ( not the cms ).
Now because Rails is such a “turn keyish” type of framework, issues start to occur when sites start to grow, and what happens is that because so much was done for you at the framework level, meaning “Oh, look in Rails you don’t have to worry about X, it is handled automatically”, that when issues start to occur you are not familiar thoroughly with the architecture ( internals of RAILS) that is becomes extra work to handle high loads.
These issues are also in CakePHP which is the closest implementation of Rails in PHP, they even copied the mistakes! Symfony, Zend, and Joomla Framework are much more loosely coupled, with Zend coming out as the loosest. To deal with very high traffic, TWITTER had to start scrapping away RAILS in certain parts and start developing with scala and even c++. Many Rails fanboys started crying when this happened.
In all, there are very competent Ruby programmers out there that aren’t tied to Rails, but nowhere near the amount of PHP. Either with Ruby on Rails or PHP or any other programming language, its easier when you got basic knowledge about it, its would help you on creating website.