I've been learning PHP for a while now but nothing to serious, just enough to make simple things. Recently I've been seing more and more about Ruby which is making me think of switching over. I have tried searching through google and different websites about the differences but couldn't find anything that I really understand. I may be wrong but what It seems like to me is Ruby is mainly used for bigger projects and PHP is used for smaller projects. I'm looking for a language that will allow me to create things like blogs, admin systems, social network sites etc. Could someone explain the main differences and say what you think is better for me, either ruby or php. Thanks
It's a highly subjective question to ask. Having worked with both, I can give you my observations. Overall I would say that PHP is a more stable and mature environment than Ruby is. There are more available libraries, and they have had time to stabilise. It's also a lot easier to configure and deploy, because there are generally working packages for your platform, and because you don't have to make a lot of choices upfront.
For Web Development I switched from Perl to PHP because Perl started to lack in the web development arena (15+ years of experience with Perl). I wouldn't switch from PHP to Ruby or Python simply because they ALL will accomplish the same task. It makes no sense to switch over. You know a little PHP...it's time to learn a lot more of it. Why start over from the beginning?
Ruby has closures and powerful meta programming facilities. PHP doesn't. Jruby also gives you a lot of things you don't have in PHP. For example, you can use any java library directly in Jruby, and you can deploy ruby (rails as well) on any typical java setup.