PHP5 Vs. CakePHP Vs. RubyOnRails? 469
OldJavaHack writes "If you could start a website (with MySQL for persistence) from scratch and you had a choice of PHP5, CakePHP, or RubyOnRails — which would you choose and why? Things to consider in your decision: 1. Maturity of solution; 2. Features; 3. Size of community of skilled users (to build a team); 4. Complexity/ease of use (for neophytes to master); 5. Greatest strength of your choice, and the greatest weaknesses of the other two. Here is a comparison of capabilities."
Sure (Score:3, Funny)
Next?
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Re:Sure (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sure (Score:5, Funny)
kdawson, for posting this absolute shit as an IT story with nothing more than a link to a wikipedia article in the summary!
Congratulations!
Hey, kdawson, while you're reading this, can I just grease you up about a story I want to post about how Steam will replace electricity to power the electric kettles of the future [google.com]? Thanks buddy!
Re:Sure (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sure (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sure (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never used Ruby or RoR, but my impression of it seems to be one of great expectations and not a lot of delivery. I've read way too many blogs by people who built web sites with RoR only to have them crash and burn under load. Also, the language itself seems to place a lot of importance on clever syntactic sugar, which being an old fart I automatically dislike.
Now, "scale" does not mean the same thing to everyone. There's Digg and Wikipedia, and then there's the vertical business app that gets 200 hits per day. RoR might be a good choice for the latter, not so good for the former.
Also, although my experience with PHP is limited as well, it seems to me that it's a mature enough platform with a good runtime (that tends to be confusing at times) and a *massive* user base. The amount of readily available PHP code out there is amazing. It will take Ruby quite a few years to get to that point, I think. So maybe Ruby is not a good beginner's environment, application-wise. But that's just my perception of it. PHP is more to the point. On the other hand, RoR might be more mature and stable than CakePHP, just because it's been around longer.
The best tool for the job and all that, you know?
Oh... and BTW, first post =)
In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never used Ruby or RoR... my experience with PHP is limited as well...
In other words, you were trolling. :-)
Having done websites in PHP, Rails, Python and Java, I can say that they all suck one way or another. Ruby and Rails are both very different from PHP and my personal unconfirmed suspicion is that a lot of the Rails problems people have are from programmers who jump over into Rails without first learning what they're getting themselves into. Deploying Rails can be very difficult and you can face a lot of issues that you would never face for PHP.
Personally, I prefer Python or Ruby over PHP any day.
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. I know enough about high-scaling distributed applications to be dangerous, since that's what I do for a living. I know PHP runs sites like Wikipedia and Digg, among others. I know I've never seen a blogger go on record to complain about PHP not scaling as he expected, while for RoR that sort of thing seemed quite common in the last year and a half or so.
Yes, your execution can suck and so it won't really matter what language or stack you use. But the impression I have of RoR is that it falls apart a lot faster than PHP under comparable loads. Maybe the crappy internal design PHP suffers from might be an advantage in this case, because Ruby is designed better but it seems to suffer from classic bottom-heavy OO problems you see in other languages.
Ultimately the person who submitted this might be building an accounts receivable app at a little company that gets three hundred hits per day, so it won't really matter if he writes it with Ruby, PHP or Malbolge.
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PHP doesn't scale at all. It's a shared-nothing system, so whatever scaling issues you run into are, by definition, nothing to do with PHP itself; th
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, even the Ruby, and Ruby on Rails site http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/feb/php-easter-eggs [shiflett.org]> need PHP in order to scale
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I hate PHP with the power of a thousand suns, but scalability isn't one of the reasons. It
Re:Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
You have the right idea about RoR (speaking as someone who excitedly spent
CakePHP is a typical PHP open source project: random code, bloated, no direction. It's also cool, in a way, but I'd never run big project on it.
One promising framework for PHP appeared to be Mojavi, but it later stalled and was forked into Agavi. Agavi tends to try to be way too flexible for its own good (unlike RoR), and in the end is just not simple to use. There's just too much stuff in there you'll never use in a real world project, which complicates code understanding and development.
I also find the "CakePHP vs PHP5" question to not make any sense, I'm sorry.
Re:Sure (Score:4, Insightful)
The beauty of Ruby is, even if you don't like it the way they do it, you can always monkey patch it. Open up the object and override the method(s) you don't like.
Try doing that to the PHP core libs. Better know C, and love it a lot.
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You have the right idea about RoR (speaking as someone who excitedly spent /wasted/ a month learning into it). RoR has some hot ideas but it tries to be too smart and locked down for its own good.
I had the same experience. Right now I'm trying out Catalyst [catalystframework.org] + Mason [masonhq.com] running under mod_perl.
Catalyst takes most of the good ideas from RoR and combines them with Perl's TIMTOWTDI philosophy, rather than Rails' "our way or the highway" attitude.
Mason is a PHP-like templating language for Perl.
It makes little sense to say Rails doesn't scale.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, I wouldn't write Digg in it, but *I'll never write Digg in anything*. Neither will 99% of the world's programmers, and for the 1% that are making social networking sitse with desired user numbers the size of nation states, they have the LAMP stack and God bless them for it.
As for me, I've got one quite profitable desktop application written in Java (folks laughed at me for that -- what can I say, it got the job done) and am having a bloody ball working on a small business vertical app which, at $15 / account / month and low predicted need for users to interact with the app, would replace my day job income at about three dynamic page hits per hour. I have this funny feeling that Rails will scale that far.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
You could, you know, link to those "way too many blogs" and thus let the rest of us decide for ourselves if this is incriminating evidence against Ruby.
"I read it on a blog" does not in any way imply truth.
"I read it on many blogs" doesn't really make it much better.
And until then, you shall remain a troll. After you post the links, you'll have your status upgraded to "person with an opinion, willing to discuss".
Re:Sure (Score:5, Informative)
Is that specific enough for you?
Would you like some salt to go with your crow? Let me know.
Twitter Follow-Up (Score:4, Insightful)
And there's a good follow-up [romeda.org] by one of his coworkers:
We've been extremely happy with Rails, and make use of the multitude of helpers that it offers us - like any application on any stack, though, providing fast response times to a (rapidly) growing number of users is a challenge. The solutions are often tightly coupled to the application and its characteristics, and while scaling the most trafficked Rails site in the world, we've run into situations where existing solutions weren't enough.
Rails is best at database baby-sitting, which is not what Twitter is about and it's understandable they would have issues. Ruby is slow and we need a good virtual machine. Nevertheless, Twitter does run on Ruby which shows that it can be made to scale. Not that Twitter is a good measure of anything other than, well, Twitter. And I'm sure someone could have done it with PHP, Python, Erlang or C.
Which is always why blanket statements about languages and platforms is always a bad idea. Just look at the comments on this article. It's just a chance for everyone to trumpet their favorite web framework or language. Sure we have our favorite tools, but most of them suck at one thing or another.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, you can get specific like that, yes. But please, follow the story to its completion [sharedcopy.com]. The issue was solved, and easily solvable from day one. (For a better solution to the same problem, see this link [drnicwilliams.com].)
I currently write chronically non-scaling Rails apps myself. I can write apps in Rails that scale well, but it turns out there's a huge market for sites that don't need to, and that's where I'm spending some time these days. I've also worked on a nicely-scaling social network site in Rails. There are plenty of tutorials on how to make sure your Rails app scales, but here are the things I'll have to do to my company's custom CMS to make it scale:
Oh noes! The horror! Then it's up to Apache to handle pretty much every request. Of course, my use case only has to make static content scale. As long as you're actually writing nice stateless apps on the web, in whatever language, they'll scale. If a given URL has static content across visits, they'll scale insanely well, because you don't Mb>use RoR to serve the site in those cases, you use Apache.
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YMMV, as a RAD tool running a vertical app with a mostly normalized postgresql db which was created for the task, it delivered a lot to me.
Of course the article submitter chooses mysql and website building as a task and the stupid comparison of a language vs. frameworks (no matter how powerful the library of the language, working with a framework is a different matter altogether, with pr
Re:Sure (Score:4, Interesting)
PHP is comparable to Ruby or ModRuby. Ruby on Rails is a framework.
Of course there's no scaling issues with these languages because they're just programming languages. Things like load balancing are something YOU have to take into account as you build your website and manually handle. You can architect things anyway you want, so if stuff fails it's your fault. This means DB transactions, sessions, templating, etc. are all things you have to handle. The language can't be at fault for these things.
Ruby on Rails is slower for many things because it saves you upfront development time and makes refactoring and adding features a breeze. For many people this is perfectly fine. I write intranet apps for my company in RoR all the time, and it's great. We do not handle many users, but we DO care about getting functionality fast.
Also, for some ridiculous reason people seem to think that RoR does not scale because an out of the box RoR stack may not scale perfectly (like Twitter). RoR may be slower than a tuned PHP script in some cases, but it scales horizontally just fine.
Lots of people may think Twitter and say RoR doesn't scale. But what they don't know is that twitter didn't scale because their DB didn't scale to handle that many writes. You can always throw more boxen at rails and get a larger pool of Rails processes to distribute the load to. You can throw Memcached at it to speed up queries as well, but at the time the whole Twitter complaint happened Rails only supported one database connection. This was fixed soon after. The fact is though, that once you have a service with so many reads and writes like twitter, out of the box ANYTHING is going to suck. Rails, however, gained the necessary functionality (Magic Multiconnections) and allows for all the custom tweaks, performancing tuning, and caching you'll need.
Getting a Rails server up and running in 5 minut (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sure (Score:4, Funny)
--
-nick [nickcatalano.com]
Re:Sure (Score:5, Funny)
1. PHP: What people build real websites with.
2. RoR: What people build websites with because they want to be kewl and later switch to PHP when they realize it simply does not scale, complete with acerbic "I wanted to believe" blog entry and everything
Next?
Pfft.. Real men code websites in Java and ASP. Scalability and performance are for pussies. My server to chugs at 10 hits/minute and it likes it.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Funny)
I think Real Men would be more likely to build the web server and TCP stack into their web sites, for performance reasons.
At least that's what we did in my day.
*cough*
Re:Sure (Score:4, Funny)
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There's no doubt that Ruby and Rails especially are much slower in execution time than comparable code written in PHP. That said, the PHP code would be 2-10x as verbose, take far longer to write, and be far less maintainable. With Rails you just throw more hardware at it and i
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I work mostly with ASP.NET, really. Like I said in a later post, I have the impression of RoR being problematic for a lot of people, scale-wise.
That is a tradeoff, of course, and it's really up to each person to decide the mer
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It's based (among other things) on the principle that you can optimize to your hearts content as long as you have the ability to de-optimize running code (and data) when something changes and your optimizations are no longer valid.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Informative)
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Crud. I replied to the wrong post.
No. That is, it's not the right (and easy!) way to handle it, so you can assume that someone will invent a clever workaround that will defeat your code. Really, just use named parameters and be done with it. It's easier than building your queries by hand and far safer, so there's no reason whatsoever not to do it.
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DROP TABLE Customers;
You also forgot to enumerate every stored procedure that might be callable, or guard against injecting unauthorized columns in those really dynamic queries that specify columns as parameters.
Bound parameters protect against SQL injection without having to interrogate every bit of SQL and praying that you covered every attack. With bound parameters, something that real DB APIs have supported from day 1, you don't need goofy h
Re:Sure (Score:4, Insightful)
Seeing as "Our team is familiar with..." plays no part in this decision whatsoever, I'd say that we are dealing with kids writing Their First Site. Or, looking at the peculiar phrasing and noting the date, kids who have just received their first homework assignment for a project that requires them to submit a plan first.
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Re:Sure (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I "checked" Twitter [radicalbehavior.com]. Are the authors of the other ones also on record saying the technology they chose fails to scale?
... Robots in disguise ... More than meets the eye (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't this just asking for flamewars? (Score:2, Insightful)
Brrrr... (Score:2, Insightful)
JSP and ASP.Net (Yes, I know, this is Slashdot) are, IMHO, much more much more powerful and pleasant to work with. If I had to pick amongst the proposed solutions, I'd pick RoR if only for the fact that Ruby is a nice language. I don't know
Re:Brrrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll change the way you think about development for the web.
Or, if you're really set on Java, try Rails for Java Developers [amazon.com] and you'll see how much more concise the exact same code is in Rails.
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Re:Brrrr... (Score:5, Insightful)
public class DoStuff {
protected double someNumber;
public setSomeNumber( double number ) {
try {
someNumber = number;
} catch (Exception e) {
}
}
}
... with some PHP for the same code, which would look like this:
public class DoStuff {
private someNumber;
public setSomeNumber($number) {
try {
$this->someNumber = $number;
} catch (Exception $e) {
}
}
}
I don't see how that's wacky syntax in the slightest. Just people people use PHP like it's Perl+Mason doesn't mean you can't use PHP for serious, scaleable, enterprise software. I know from experience that people are just as likely to write nasty Perl, Ruby or ASP as they are nasty PHP.
Personally I think Java makes it more difficult to be wacky (even though of course it can't force people to write code that's ultimately good) and that has definite benefits in an enterprise environment, but that lack of flexibility (which scripting languages like Perl and PHP have) is also why I don't tend to want to use Java.
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Java is great if you work on a single application with its own hosting environment, if you need mul
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That would be a problem with a specific application's packaging, nothing to do with the language that was used to code it.
J2EE specifies application specific library directories, which is how you should be deploying them. If you are deploying your libraries into a shared directory and modifying the classpath, then it is you that is at fault, not J
Rails (Score:5, Interesting)
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Errr, this is a new story (Score:2, Informative)
That being said, CakePHP is fantastic and for anything past simple scripts, I am finding CakePHP speeds up development greatly.
Re:Errr, this is a new story (Score:5, Insightful)
Lately people (aka: script kiddies) seem to be losing the distinction between what is a language, and what is a framework. I cannot remember the last time I downloaded a PHP script and it required PEAR. I absolutely despise PEAR, and all other frameworks that really don't seem to have a place.
Over the past 5 years or so (I develop websites for a living) I've developed a framework-style setup that I use for all new projects. Most sites don't share the same code as I develop project-specific. But the structure is the same, and in most cases I could grab a pile of files from one site and plop them in the next and it would work.
Use the tool as it is meant to be used. PHP is a language. A framework is a framework. Please don't compare them on the same level.
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Except that in this case, the comparison is valid. PHP without a framework is, if you will, the null framework. Its advantages are that there is no learning curve, deployment is trivial, and there's no runtime framework overhead to heat up your CPUs. On the other hand, it doesn't help you at all in writing the app, and once your site gets beyond a certain size you'll probably
Doesn't it depend on what you intend to do? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't it depend on what you intend to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree. Rails is fantastic for quickly rolling database-driven forms apps. It includes some nice helpers for quickly integrating asynchronous behavior (Ajax), but it's certainly not mandatory. PHP5 doesn't include an OR mapper, and nor should it; an OR mapper should be part of a separate framework or library (just as it is with Ruby and Ruby on Rails). I think that Rails actually has a fairly steep learning curve. It has *very* specific ways of handling most things, and trying to fight against these things will only come back to hurt you in the end. Additionally, since it requires you to function in an MVC mode, there might be an additional bit of learning present as you figure out how to properly separate your app into presentation, model and controller layers.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to need and experience. If you know how to use PHP, why not use it? If you have to integrate a new feature into an existing Rails app, then you'd better learn Rails in a hurry. Personally, I'll build Windows server-targeted web apps in ASP.NET because I know the tooling and the backend. If I'm hosting on Linux or UNIX, I'll write it in Rails because the language and frameworks are so much nicer to use than PHP.
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Rails only has a steep learning curve because most people learning Rails are also learning Ruby for the first time. Learning a language and a framework simultaneously is hard. Ruby, by itself, is actually very easy to learn... principle of least surprise and all that. And if you're already know Ruby, are comf
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And, yeah, comparing Rails to PHP5 is kinda dumb because Rails is a framework and PHP5 is a language. The problem with using "PHP5" in any non-trivial application is that you invariably end up build
the answer: it depends (Score:5, Insightful)
Any halfway skilled programmer will be able to do useful work with any of those frameworks fairly early on, but all of them are also very rich environments, so there's always more to learn.
I've written web apps in an ungodly tangle of PHP4 and PHP 5 and Perl and using Ruby on Rails. Currently Ruby on Rails is in favor, but is far from perfect.
Probably most of my frustration with Rails and PHP 5 has to do with Active Record. My big gripes are: (1) Schemas, entity-relationship diagrams, and queries tell me how an application works -- with Active Record this information is strewn across a whole bunch of files (especially in Rails); (2) Database-independence is a nice idea, but in reality, how often over the lifetime of your website will you migrate to a different database? Usually your database is chosen for you. Usually a switching databases involves coordinating with a lot of people who you'd usually rather not have to deal with -- those issues will take far more time and energy than differences between MySQL and Oracle; (3) a pretty common design pattern for web pages is to have a form that let's you fill in a few parameters (date, maybe geographical information) into a huge multi-table select statement -- you can do that in Active Record, but basically all you gain is a marginally fancier wrapper than you would have with DBI.
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If you told me I could pick either the database to use or the scripting language to code in, I'd pick Postgresql and let you pick the language. Most of the things people try to do in scripting languages can be handled in the database much more elegantly and scalably. Of course, most people don't realize this because they've only used MySQL and don't realize how much it's missing.
If you told me I could pi
Focus.. (Score:3, Interesting)
May I remind you all of this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetargon/1279842 54/
Yes, that's the creator of RoR talking about what he feels about other people not liking his framework. RoR is all about pretty code, if you don't like RoR, use something else.
So, that sorted that out. Now, troll!
Django (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Django - Fourthed (Score:2, Informative)
i have developed in perl, php, java (webwork with hibernate and IoC containers and what-not) but with django you can get things done much faster and get cleaner results..
(and some self-advertising - look at my project http://sct.sphene.net/ [sphene.net] - forum & wiki applications based on django)
Easy (Score:5, Informative)
Django (Score:5, Informative)
Check out the tutorial, and you'll know why: http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/tutori
Snakes and Rubies (Score:3, Informative)
There was a good video, although outdated (2005), that had two of the main developers of Django and RoR. The video is quite long (3hrs), so I'll link to the Google Video Search [google.com]. The second and third are each person's presentation, and the fourth, which I recommend, is a Q/A session.
-metric
Dive into Python (Score:4, Informative)
Whether it's Ruby on Rails, or Django, most developers will have to learn a new language. Python has a book available online: Dive into Python [diveintopython.org]. I found it very easy to switch from C/C++/PHP to python. Django does have a slight learning curve though. Oh, and be aware, the Django documentation online is for their SVN version! Most likely NOT your distro's version. They are still under heavy development.
-metric
Re:Dive into Python (Score:4, Informative)
Well, you can start the tutorial here [djangoproject.com] for the SVN version, or you can read the big warning at the top of the page which links to documentation for the various releases, and find:
So long as you can read large text at the top of every page, and click clearly-offered links, you can read the documentation for dev version, or for any stable release we've ever done.
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The only negative side is the lack of Python developers. I've found a handful around here (Tampa) but they seem to be a rarity. I can find a few Ruby developers, but their extent of Ruby is only RoR tutorials, it seems.
Wrong Criteria, Wrong Problem, Wrong Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
You've provided no information on the actual website that you intend to develop. That's the important part -- the features and functionality to the customers and end users.
Instead of considering the features of the language and framework first, how about the features of the application? How many users? Who will be supporting it? What kind of server resources are available? Do you need internationalization? What's the roadmap for the site over the next 3 to 5 years? Maybee then you can map the features of the website to the features of the framework or language, such as the maturity of the libraries directly related to your webapp.
But picking the implementation language independent of the functionality of the website is a classic sign of solving the wrong problem. I don't care what you program it in, if you're asking these questions first, you are programming it in the wrong language.
Tapestry (Score:4, Insightful)
Rails just does not have a stable server. Webrick + fastCGI, or Mongrel, they both crash regularly for us. Also I've had to maintain several Rails apps written by others, and it sucks. All those neat tricks that makes it "productive" for the first programmer makes it difficult to understand and maintain for everyone else.
Python and Django (Score:5, Informative)
How about using Python and Django [djangoproject.com]? Python is a much cleaner language than both PHP and Ruby, and Django makes it a joy to build web-sites.
I've been lead developer of a large enterprise system written in PHP for the last few years, and grown increasingly frustrated with just how ugly PHP is. Object-orientation has been tacked on as an after-thought (almost all of the API is procedural, without using exceptions for error-handling), the API is messy and inconsistent, it's somewhat inefficient (has to parse all the code for each request, unless you use an opcode cache), and the syntax is just plain ugly when compared to Python.
Never tried Ruby on Rails, but you should at least give Django a spin before deciding.
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...said egrinake, the God that Decides Which Language that Rocks More.
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I know I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but at least syntax-wise (and the syntax is basically the language) I'd say it is. I think you'd have a hard arguing that Python has noisier syntax than PHP at least (don't have alot of Ruby experience, but Python code seems easier to read).
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Yes, damn that Python. I mean, Ruby is so much cleaner. In Ruby, everything's an object! Wait, no, that's true in Python too. But in Python you have to prepend self to talk about an instance variable, that's ugly! Oh, wait, Ruby uses @ and has self for some cases, too. Hm. Well, Ruby's got all that metaprogramming goodness, surely you can't d
Language comparisons (Score:4, Insightful)
PHP is just ugly, (see grandparent) Perl and Ruby are quite fun and share the same philosophy (see TIMTOWTDI [c2.com]) where Python is just the opposite (although fun too).
Python and Ruby also share their deep roots in clean object orientation, where Perl's OO syntax is - though bolted on - very flexible and even more TIMTOWTDI than Ruby's.
Just to set things straight, I really like Perl, Ruby and Python, though I can confirm that developing web applications with Django is bliss.
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You're right, but is this necessarily a bad thing?
The web itself is procedural. Unless you're a sadist, web applications are broken out into different URIs that handle different part of the applications. Administration functions might be in myapp/admin
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Sounds functional to me. Throw the inherent statelessness of the protocol on top for a bonus.
PHP5 (Score:3, Funny)
Have your cake/php/rails and eat it to (Score:4, Insightful)
What we have here is another usual question that all really depends on your project type. That being said, I'll try to break from the typical, slashdot format and attempt to address your question:
P.S. A similar question of Rails vs PHP vs Java question was somewhat subjectively discussed late last year http://www.cmswire.com/cms/industry-news/php-vs-ja va-vs-ruby-000887.php [cmswire.com]
CakePHP vs PHP5? This makes no fucking sense. (Score:2)
If you've used Rails, then CakePHP /hurts/ (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not to knock CakePHP. In its own right, CakePHP is an excellent framework and a lot of quality work has gone into making it what it is. It's a powerful framework.
The move to this kind of framework can be quite a mind job, whether you're moving to Rails or CakePHP. It requires breaking down very solid foundations of ideas that you've built up over the years on how to build a web application. If PHP is your thing, then weathering that mind job will be all the more easier if you're doing it in a language already familiar to you. But if you're willing to try something new, then it's worth making the jump to Ruby on Rails.
PHP = Assembler of web dev compared to two (Score:2)
go pro. go php5.
Django. (Score:3, Informative)
language, framework, framework (Score:5, Informative)
Perl advocates should try CATALYST (Score:4, Informative)
Application skeleton and database CRUD in 30 seconds (measured!!!). Try it.
Symfony (PHP 5 Framework), Notes on other Webkits (Score:5, Informative)
There are a lot of Frameworks recommended here, such as Django, Turbogears and others. They are all very neat. I'd like to add Zope (or it's superset Plone) to that list as it is the oldest and most mature of all these neat OSS Webkits.
Rails is the first project that emphatically applied marketing tactics to make itself popular, thus the extreme hype surrounding it and the potential critical mass it has gained. It's simular to the hype Zend is putting behind it's Zend Framework right now. Which is also way overhyped with bold claims despite being less than a year old. However Rails is *not* the Framework that invented or first implemented MVC, Scaffolding or all the other concepts associated with it.
A Webdevelopers 2 cents.
Feature, concept and technology wise Zope (built with Python) is still unmatched by any other Framework or Appserver available, be it in Python, Ruby, Java or whatever.
CakePHP is a good Framework - I'm using on PHP 5 it just now to build a larger custom CRM System - and the community is fun (no Forum - we all hang out on IRC) but I recommend Symfony [symfony-project.com], as it is built entirely on PHP 5 no extra work added for PHP 4 compliance, covers aspects of it job by integrating existing Projects such as Creole and Propel for the DB stuff and it has very good documentation. Including a very well written Book (free PDF version available). Symfony is mature and has been successfully used in very large scale Projects (Yahoo Bookmarks is built on it).
Bottom Line: I'd be carefull not to blindly follow the rabid hypers of Rails or their fresh PHP equivalent, the Zend Framework bandwagon crew. Check out the Frameworks people have mentioned here and if you want to stick to PHP 5 Cake or Symfony are both fine choices.
PHP beats RoR on deployment (Score:4, Insightful)
A key issue, in contrasting PHP with RoR, is deployment.
Deploying PHP is easy in most environments, perhaps as much because of its age as because of its inherent character. I work in an academic environment, in which all professors and students have the ability to make PHP sites. Each of my personal computers also lets me make PHP sites with no difficulty. Deployment amounts to no more than a file copy, perhaps with a change of file permissions. (I won't mention the database work, because of course it is the same for all schemes, PHP, RoR, etc.)
But, unless you're using a host that has been set up to server RoR, deployment may involve changing Apache configuration files, compiling new Apache modules, etc. Such changes require root access (not available to folks sharing machines), and have the potential to break the other sites on the machine.
I think there is a reason why the RoR tutorials, books, and promoters so seldom mention deployment: it is difficult for many people in non-commercial environments that are not set up for RoR.
Oh, and one more thing. All of this fiddling with apache is boring to those who have set out to create websites. Learning Ruby to do RoR is quite fun, actually, and it has the advantage that it lets you use Ruby for other tasks as well. But learning apache doesn't help you with anything but apache; it's a bit of a single-lane road.
RoR has a sort of elegance about it, and you gain a great deal of functionality from the system (e.g. for logins, etc.), and so it is a terrific tool for rapid development, particularly of an evolving idea for a site. It sounds crazy, but the optimal path may be to write the site in RoR and then rewrite it in PHP, so that deployment will be easy and so that the site will scale well[*].
* -- I've not mentioned scaling and speed because these issues are covered in other posts here. Basically, RoR is not impressive on either.
Ocsigen (Score:3, Interesting)
If you had really complete freedom and were willing to try out something radically different from existing frameworks, I would suggest you would take a look at Ocsigen [ocsigen.org]. It is based on the OCaml [inria.fr] language, which alone implies a different mindset from traditional frameworks based on imperative languages. Some of Ocsigen's cool features:
Sorry if this sounds like a sales pitch, but I would just like to point out that there are wonderful technologies out there, if people were just willing to take a step outside the trodden path.
I learned PHP once (Score:4, Insightful)
I started learning it. By about a chapter into the PHP book, I was thinking "holy crap, this language is uglier than perl". It has everything you would expect from a language thrown together by people who were either ignorant of software engineering or aware of it, but aggressively hostile to it. Everything global by default? WTF?
I have never seen a language with so many carefully crafted security holes that the developer needs to learn to avoid. Default behavior for inclusion is to allow URLs, so you can, you know, run code from any site in the world. There's a feature everyone always wanted, which is never going to be subverted!
I made it through about two and a half PHP books. In that time I learned that the MySQL and PostgreSQL interfaces were substantively different, and of course, used differently-named functions with slightly different calling conventions. Why? Because there's no abstraction or generalization going on; just whatever features sound cool getting thrown in with some name that wasn't previously in use. I learned that this is just BASIC all over again.
I spent several days thinking hard about bleach, and went back to programming languages that were designed with some kind of consideration given to the development of larger projects.
Ruby's undoubtedly "slow". That's what everyone said about perl and awk, too. Come to think of it, I've had people tell me that C was too slow. But Ruby has the amazing, shining, virtue that it is not a stupidly-designed or ugly language. I spent a while working with Ruby, and some helpful people pointed out that, in fact, the language does have a gotcha to watch out for. One. Not so many that you have to buy whole books full of things that you'd obviously try that don't work, open your site up to XSS, or behave erratically. No, just the one.
Can PHP work? Sure. But the tacked-on afterthoughts provided to allow you to, in theory, if you remember to and want to put in the work, use basic software engineering principles, are not enough. The language provides a huge array of runtime functionality, with a function for everything. It doesn't provide the basic tools you want for engineering large projects, meaning that the workload of maintaining big stuff in PHP is exponential, not just quadratic.
It can be made to work, but it really is that badly considered, and I wish people would stop doing things in it. Life is easy enough for the botnet people already, we don't need a language in which you have to be warned not to set the flag that lets remote sites set every global variable in your program.
Re:I learned PHP once (Score:4, Funny)
You probably sit in some comfortable chair in an air conditioned office somewhere going, "oh, oh, globals, oh no, don't hack me, please!"
Some of us are too busy balancing our RAD needs while fighting off bikini-clad ninja chicks with harpoons and barbed-wire dildoes to be concerned to get our panties in a bunch over globals.
Please, you're standing on my dick.
Perl Catalyst (Score:3, Informative)
Catalyst and Perl both more mature than the frameworks/languages mentioned.
2. Features;
CPAN is bigger, Perl has more functionality which is why there is more than one way to do it (TIMTOWTDI) in Perl.
3. Size of community of skilled users (to build a team);
More skilled Perl programmers.
4. Complexity/ease of use (for neophytes to master);
Mmmm well can't say. PHP based thing with only one layout you can use might be simplest for a newbie. On the other hand, are you trying to make a serious webapp or just a cookie cutter steaming phpnuke thing? Am interested in Ruby mainly because it just might reduce typing but then again maybe not. Just seems neat. But for making a live system I'd go with Perl.
5. Greatest strength of your choice, and the greatest weaknesses of the other two.
Many available modules. Other two have a much shorter [programmer pool size] x [framework and modules powerfulness] vector.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:with MySQL, eh... so much for having a choice (Score:4, Interesting)
So whatt? There's enough people who actually care (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's difficult to understand, since PHP combines the quirkyness of Perl with the syntactic bloat of Java and does have some other shortcommings. However, it handles all web stuff very gracefully. Tons of functions in PHP are built to handle the everyday shortcommings the WWW Inet-service brings along. And they are all come