Should I Learn PHP or Ruby on Rails?

PHP is great for me

 

Ruby on rails is not a language! It's simply a framework for the language Ruby.

 

Correct me if I wrong, but ROR is been here for a while and there I still don't kno w any complex products on it. 37signals has small simple services, no doubt they are great...

All other websites made with ROR that I saw are pretty slow (I hope they will solve problem with speed in next versions).

Maybe now everything changed, but about 2 months ago when I was going to start to learn ROR I just was not able to find anything like big e-shops or similar.

That's great there are cheap hostings already available. Actually I like ror syntax and approach, but I just feel that it's pretty early to switch my main programming language to it.

 

Rather than limit yourself to one language or framework, you should spend a few weeks learning programming concepts (control flow, variables, methods, objects, etc.) and how web servers and sites work.

These things are a constant across the common web programming languages and will serve you better in the long run.

Learn how things work; sweat the syntax later.

Good luck,
Ty

 

But they often vary between languages so that will do nothing but confuse him. Just pick a language. Seeing as you have no previous experience I suggest you choose PHP. It's easier, more forgiving, and there's a lot more resources available.

 

hi,
what kind of complexity are you looking for as a web developer?

what slow sites are you referring to? have you seen twittr? ive read their ruby rails application is handling ~15k requests a second on a busy day. yes they are busy coming up with a solution to improve speeds, but yea, those are the kinds of troubles most of us here hope to get one day! there are also other big companies using rails as well...http://workingwithrails.com/high-profile-organisations

the benefit of ror is the speed at which one can develop a site and framework that handles the organization and user interaction. also ajax is real easy to implement with all of rubys helper functions.

i guess the question just simply boils down to if your making money doing what your doing, learning another web language probably wont help. if your an experienced web developer and cant create sites like digg, youtube, myspace, etc...there is something wrong.

i just started learning web development since august 2006. heck, i didnt even make a webpage before using html. but now as i look back, i am glad i stepped into the ror direction. i can now create sites like the 'big dogs'. hopefully one day, i too can be 'bought out'. =)

good luck!

 

i tryed Ruby on rails, but i find it too inflexible, i know many people will find my opinion suprising, but after you do all sort of sites with php, RoR is just not worth all the learning curve. besides, php is wayyyy much faster

 

Ok, here is an example - web shop. A big one with a lot of categories, items, users, coupon systems, payment systems, etc.
Sorry I can't find now a shop that I saw about 2 months ago. It was the reason I decided not to learn ror for now. At that moment a was really exited about ror, but that website was so slow... (Maybe everything could be quite different if I have not seen it)

It's hard to believe that have reached such number of requests with ruby! If they did I guess they are magicians! Probably there were few servers and a lot of caching...Could you give a link to that article? I will appreciate a lot. It's interesting to me.

Actually I have reached about 2k request a second. We were working on script that was getting information from main server in real time (once a sec). And that script was running on ~200 servers. So you can't say "most of us here hope to get these kind of troubles", I was not hoping to get them too, but you never know what work you will have working as a freelancer

Hey! You said you want to be 'bought out'... You mean by some big company? Why?

Anyway... I wish you good luck with your future projects, friend.

 

Please go learn php, and just use php like everyone else here.

I'm going to stick with Ruby & Rails, and also get all the high-paying contracting jobs.

By all means help me keep this 'share' of web-development small. With Ruby on Rails, the project cycle is faster, more reliable, and at a very high level.

Ruby is a beautiful language and not limiting in any way. The framework Rails is just as powerful because it's built with Ruby.

Please, do me a favor and stick with PHP


p.s I've noticed that most who have bad grammar, bash Ruby / Rails and praise the PHP flag. Interesting - maybe it goes hand in hand with the bad grammar PHP produces when you write code.

 

Ruby actually is bloated and it sucks, the function you get out of using ror is entirely down to rails, NOT ruby.

Nevermind your 2-click sites ( which is basically what the rails aim is ), you come up with the most complicated PROGRAMMING function you can think of, I'll bet a million dollars I can do it 10 times faster than you or any "pro" rails user can, and I'll be able to do it without opening an IDE, and without my pc having to hold my hand all the way.

There isnt a single thing rails can do that php can't, there just isn't, and people that say there is are just no good at php, simple as that.

No one is bashing rails, it's just not php .....

 

What you just said paints you to be such an idiot I don't know where to start. Please by all means keep trying to convince yourself it's better. Yes RoR is a great framework, but Ruby itself sucks. Not to mention there are numerous frameworks available for PHP that can do everything that RoR can and more.

RoR has been well marketed to fit in with the web 2.0 buzz and that's the only reason it has become so popular. Half the people using it don't have a clue about advanced

P.S. I find it ironic that you insult our spelling and grammar, yet you make multiple mistakes and even name the framework wrong. It's Ruby on Rails (hence RoR) not Ruby & Rails. And yet what I find even more ironic is that you slate PHP, yet your blog is using the very same language you slate (http://www.danielfischer.com/?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42). In fact, all 3 of your sites do. If Ruby is so great, why don't you put your money where your mouth is?

So does us all a favour and get off the bandwagon.

 

hi everyone,
im glad we are all passionate about programming(never thought in hs/college id be in a forum talking about stuff..)! these kinds of questions/debates just makes us all better.

php and ror, they can both be used to make money.

from my brief reading, php is better at scaling whereas RoR is better in development time and maintenance. however, scaling issues dont become an issue till your well over 10k requests a second. now, choose your weapon!

 

Here is another vote for PHP. It is the easiest language out there and you will actually like it.

 

But what you fail to understand is RoR is just a framework. It's just a bit of code that makes development a bit easier. There's at least 10 frameworks that are equal or better than RoR. So using RoR as an argument for Ruby being better than PHP is just being ignorant.

Again, a wrong assumption. Even 1 request a second is more than enough to have a load on the server with a poorly scalable program. Plus scalable doesn't just include how many hits a second you get. It also refers to how much data it has to manipulate, how it handles complex scripts with multiple functions etc.

 

PHP is not that hard to learn. You will actually like learning php. Most Content Management System (CMS) are made with php so you will be able to modify them to your heart contents.

 

its a really good framework that even google recognizes and even awarded the person who developed it. so thats saying something. if it was just another regular framework like the others, it wouldnt be talked about and backed behind plenty of smart folks and businesses.

i use ror, but did i post someplace that ror is better than php? if i did i apologize, im just a web dev noob who just started about 9 months ago. my knowledge of ror and php is basically what i read on all the forums/blogs/etc...

now about your second statement, architecture/design/and sometimes even hardware beats any programming language. some solutions in a certain language may work differently in another. that is why we have so many languages at our disposal, some are better at certain tasks, etc... you dont brute force everything, even though i like to sometimes. =)

besides, where rails is now is where most languages are at when they first start out. they all have growing pains! you can google search plenty of sites that will definitly prove that development time, maintenance, and testing are much better and simplest with RoR. when it somes to speed, you can cache plenty of data, use more memory, run mogrel, etc... by the time your site has to worry about speed, i would hope it would be generating so much money, you can easily pay someone to convert it to the next best language. besides in this business, sometimes being the first is better that anything.

like i said, it boils down to what you want in a language. choose your weapon. we can all make money no matter what language you use.

 

Isn't ASP another language? Why isn't ASP mentioned? (I'm asking because I'm debating learning PHP or ASP first )

 

php is better and more mature! most of the webhosters support PHP. If you can, learn directly php5 with better OO support.

ROR is a MVC framework and not php, but you can add MVC framwork to php, just search on google!

it's a better way to build applications to seperate the model/view/controller

 

I'm still looking for a good online php tutorial. I asked for one in a separate thread, and someone pointed me to an adult site that once long ago had a php tutorial!!

 

Try: http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp See if it helps you.